- Location
- Earth
I doubt it. There is an Essential Body Mod perk specifically designed to do that sort of thing.
A Spark of Hope (Worm/Jumpchain)
- Thread starter Eternaly_Lost
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm taylor hebert tinker jumpchain
I doubt it. There is an Essential Body Mod perk specifically designed to do that sort of thing.
- Location
- United States
The way I am treating her right now is even though Taylor is of sound mental health but past history has inertia that is hard to change, but will slowly. Not to mention other concerns I guess I should have brought up in the story and see about adding it in the next chapter when I get to editing it this weekend.
Taylor knows that as her father, and thus guardian, if he decides she should join the wards she legally has little say. It not something that the PRT would like to support, but legally if he enrolls her in the wards, the PRT can't refuse just because she doesn't want it, in much the same way that if your father decides to move you across country with no warning and you are under 18, you don't have many recourses but to go with him.
It messy, but the law views the idea situation for an underage parahuman is in the wards, in much the same way the laws view a child should be in school to learn.
Given what they learn of Taylor's powers very quickly the PRT would cite that he is her father and it his right to make her join them over taking her request to not join should it happen. It would be extemely messy all around and Taylor can see it as an option and one she would never want the risk of happening.
As such, Taylor views it as too risky to tell her father about her powers, although she quite sure he will do what is best for her, she doesn't trust him enough that he will accept that she doesn't want to join the wards. He hasn't been there properly, and he might see that the only way to handle her new powers is to hand her off to those with experience.
Taylor going to resist interacting with him until her concerns about joining the wards start to go away, which any interaction with them save for Sophia will cause her to see such, because on the whole, they are generally 'good kids'.
Likewise Taylor not going to mention Emma or the Trio for fear of bring up her powers by accident, and she thinks that with her new powers, there little chance of something like the locker 2.0 being dangerous enough to kill her, and if the trio try something like that again, she put them down.
Taylor does want to reconnect with her father now that her mind has been stabilized, but at the same time, she doesn't know how to open up such without bring topics she knows would be extremely uncomfortable for him to learn (Your best friend's daughter tried to kill me).
People of sound mind hide things from their family that they know would upset them all the time. Taylor's is a bit bigger than most, but I don't see it an issue with her being of sound mind and not telling him everything based on how he been the last few years.
Her father been rather distant himself after all.
Now if he had gotten those perks, we be talking something a lot different here.
Sooner or later she will figure out how to start opening up to him again, although telling him about her powers would require she considers joining the wards to now be acceptable. Just telling him about Emma is more like trying to tell a stranger than her father with how little they interacted over the last few years since her mother died.
Yeah it would be, and as such it would be fiat back to repair itself from any and all damage.
This. Until she gets that perk unless the perk itself say she can in the perk text she can't turn them off.
Note that if Taylor does get an alt-form, which I am ruling things like Elemental Physiology give rather than modify her base body, then she can turn the perks assigned to it off by not being in said form, but only when she not in said form.
ScottotheUnwise
Verified Crack (fic) Dealer
- Location
- Mulberry, Fl
May just be tagged under English not as first language stuff. I use the Grammarly plugin to catch a lot of similar issues.
well -> while
Bring -> Bringing
matchbooks -> matchbox
swords -> kamas
This reads weird, 'not often together' and 'often seen using' counter each other. Suggest lose 'not' in first part and drop 'seen' from second
She can very easily continue forward with decisions she made before the power over her mind kicked on completely. He is acting distant, something she might recognize as a form of sickness. She should therefore give him a hug --and while touching, hit the heal for all she is worth. And if you have ever read any of my fic Blanket* (link in sig, I am lazy), steal a patch of his clothing when it does heal him.
- Location
- Odessa
I'm not native speaker, but I think this is better:
Namely, the powers she had woken up with. Taylor was only coherent enough to understand the details of her new powers this morning, even if she knew that she had gotten them back on Monday. She also knew, rather intimately at that, muddled and incoherent had been her state of mind the last few days which her powers had taken to settle in properly.
'on the implications'?
Well, that was stronger than she was before, it just wasn't by a whole lot even on mundane scale, much less on scale of superpowers.
Second 'Well' is probably out of place.
'skip'? Ugh... confusing!
Suggestion:
This made Taylor bemusedly realize that she had been told to be interesting, yet she just did the opposite there. Since she was doing the metaphysical version of watching for a pot to boil her power expectedly found that boring and stopped. And while on that trail of thoughts Taylor noted to buy an empty notebook. She did not know what her benefactor considered interesting and it was better to note down what was and what was not bringing her points.
Last edited:
Actually, it's entirely possible that joining the wards would make her power expand tremendously. Joining anyone has the power to really drive up interest if only for the large amount of character interaction inherent in the act. The Wards are just the largest driver of such a thing due to the sheer drama that it can drive.
Actually, Taylor has all of the choice in joining the Wards. Due to the uniquely fucked up things that a Ward can do if they don't want to be in the program the ward can join and leave at will. She needs his permission to join but if she doesn't want to then she can just say no and once signed up she can leave at any time with or without his permission. He can pull her out on his own though. What Danny can do is out Taylor to the protectorate and PRT which can in many ways be even worse for her than forcing her to join up, not that either Taylor or Danny would know that.
- Location
- United States
Right, but Taylor doesn't know that legally herself. She not a lawyer (And I can't find a skill perk she could roll that would make her such), everything she learned about the wards is about telling underage capes to ask their parents to have them join the Wards, with the message making it clear it entirely on them to decide and not mention the ward themselves can say no. Something like, Children if you want to join the wards, tell your parents that you have powers and want to make a difference in the world.
Taylor assumes that it like her going to school, where she lives and so on. Even at 15, it takes some rather big acts to not force her to go with her father if he were to just up and decide to move halfway around the world with her and usually it would require something clearly unsuitable for her and generally her already having some other valid option to live at to get out of it.
There plenty of legal ways that a parent can really mess up their child's life, because the laws generally assume most parents want what best for their children, and there is a reason why when someone abuses it they are found unfit parents and removed rather than outlawing such an act since there usually a very good reason for an adult to want to do such. Moving for work so you uproot their school life and such.
It not a very big stretch for someone of a sound mind to incorrectly assume that as her guardian, he can sign her up for the wards without her wanting to do such, and given the laws about forcing children to school against their will until they are of majority, even if it sounds like a bad idea to try such, it is a very simple assumption to make.
The PRT isn't going to be rushing to tell the public that the ward can choose not to join against their parent's wishes. They make it clear when it comes up, rather than tell kids they can say no if they don't want to go the wards.
The wards are supposed to be the proper and good path for kids with powers to take after all. Saying they might want to say no to join, instead of rushing to join right away is not good PR.
I am trying to write Taylor as rational, but still a teenage girl. She doesn't have those perks yet that would tell her dad can't make her join, or what to say to make everything better between them.
She is going to fumble around as she tries to work it out, and if she decides she wants to join the wards, any issues in her mind about telling him about her powers would go away, because she would want to join them.
Most of the negatives about the chapter have already been addressed. What I really could have done without was reading about those capes and her earning interesting points for it.
I liked her initially wandering around her warehouse and all that. It may have been better for her to make a pile of junk before going to the library about it. At this stage, she doesn't know just how much raw skill/knowledge will be crammed into her head at any given moment.
I liked the nice simple exercise program. Not really exciting, but more interesting than reading about capes none of which she's remotely ready to think about facing.
Someone commented that she's not explored what interesting means. She's had her powers for less than 2 days. She should have played with that before leaving the house.
I'm not really interested in the buying or locking in thing. To me, her locking in anything at the moment is wasting her points. There are lots of good 100 point options. If she doesn't like it, she could just try being as interesting as possible to bank 600-1000 points.
I skimmed through that CF doc. It was new to me. I was utterly stunned by just how many 600 point options were everywhere in it. There were also 800 and I believe one was 1200.
She's far too focused on wanting to go out and fight. That doesn't remotely make any sense. I can see hiding her powers from her dad. I could see building stuff. Wanting to run out at the moment? Just insane. The only reason she is as healthy as she is was due to body mod perks. I'd need to go and read that section of what you gave her. I just skipped it. The only important bit was she could train to get better and keep improvements/not downgrading. She should be wanting to exercise as much as possible for the next 2 months or so. Well, not that she wants to, but that she'd be seeing and getting actual gains from it.
Her first real project needs to be an exercise room and then making her own little obstacle course through her storage area. O.k. First thought was something like making a danger room. I'm pretty sure there are training room/dungeon addons to the personal reality. At this point, I'd love for her to need to build things more her self though.
We need to see her play with pipes and hoses and screw up by flooding bits of her warehouse. Her first real issue is how the heck will she drain that water? She can't just drain it out in her house.
You screwed up by having her smart enough not to try taking a shower in her warehouse. That would have been interesting. The fallout and clean up even more so.
I'd love for her to have blundered into getting garment gloves nearly right off. Suddenly she's got a new projection best friend that's more into fashion than Emma and Glory Girl. She also wouldn't have the money to throw at garment gloves for new clothes.
I liked the random nature of CF. Skimming through your doc, made it obvious that things could be rather difficult. Unlike in CF where things seemed to just line right up for Joe, Taylor could get perks that don't really mesh together right off. It would just drive her more. She knows that eventually, she'd start collecting enough to stack in the right ways, but at the moment? Not so much.
I'd love for her to stop with the locking of things until she had points to burn. That first week, she should just let everything come to her rather randomly. It'd take her points farther.
I liked her initially wandering around her warehouse and all that. It may have been better for her to make a pile of junk before going to the library about it. At this stage, she doesn't know just how much raw skill/knowledge will be crammed into her head at any given moment.
I liked the nice simple exercise program. Not really exciting, but more interesting than reading about capes none of which she's remotely ready to think about facing.
Someone commented that she's not explored what interesting means. She's had her powers for less than 2 days. She should have played with that before leaving the house.
I'm not really interested in the buying or locking in thing. To me, her locking in anything at the moment is wasting her points. There are lots of good 100 point options. If she doesn't like it, she could just try being as interesting as possible to bank 600-1000 points.
I skimmed through that CF doc. It was new to me. I was utterly stunned by just how many 600 point options were everywhere in it. There were also 800 and I believe one was 1200.
She's far too focused on wanting to go out and fight. That doesn't remotely make any sense. I can see hiding her powers from her dad. I could see building stuff. Wanting to run out at the moment? Just insane. The only reason she is as healthy as she is was due to body mod perks. I'd need to go and read that section of what you gave her. I just skipped it. The only important bit was she could train to get better and keep improvements/not downgrading. She should be wanting to exercise as much as possible for the next 2 months or so. Well, not that she wants to, but that she'd be seeing and getting actual gains from it.
Her first real project needs to be an exercise room and then making her own little obstacle course through her storage area. O.k. First thought was something like making a danger room. I'm pretty sure there are training room/dungeon addons to the personal reality. At this point, I'd love for her to need to build things more her self though.
We need to see her play with pipes and hoses and screw up by flooding bits of her warehouse. Her first real issue is how the heck will she drain that water? She can't just drain it out in her house.
You screwed up by having her smart enough not to try taking a shower in her warehouse. That would have been interesting. The fallout and clean up even more so.
I'd love for her to have blundered into getting garment gloves nearly right off. Suddenly she's got a new projection best friend that's more into fashion than Emma and Glory Girl. She also wouldn't have the money to throw at garment gloves for new clothes.
I liked the random nature of CF. Skimming through your doc, made it obvious that things could be rather difficult. Unlike in CF where things seemed to just line right up for Joe, Taylor could get perks that don't really mesh together right off. It would just drive her more. She knows that eventually, she'd start collecting enough to stack in the right ways, but at the moment? Not so much.
I'd love for her to stop with the locking of things until she had points to burn. That first week, she should just let everything come to her rather randomly. It'd take her points farther.
ScottotheUnwise
Verified Crack (fic) Dealer
- Location
- Mulberry, Fl
I get your frustration here but as the conehead says "Maintain low tones."
You have ideas to do it better, offer.
Rest of your post leans more that way.
So, about the idea of following the interesting with bursts of points. My suggestion is that since you are taking a random route, that her benefactor can take her focusing on a branch --the 1d3 part-- to keep that section active if she is interesting on using that new achievement --or direct it into the other major branch.
After pipesx3 she could have added a water feature in her warehouse that randomly spurts within it from multiple directions to act as an obstacle course. From there she could get the option to control the water temp. And then shift to body focus and start resistances and stat improvements.
With her powers, a logical step would be to find a warehouse with gang activity and open a door from the roof to her warehouse --flood them right out the door and just fade away without anyone being the wiser.
If getting shot at spurs the interest, she might even logically get the upgrade to close her door from the inside and reopen it back to her closet.
Edit: and if her power finds reading about capes worth points then going to the Wards tour or meeting capes patrolling would be a big boost --first time bonus style.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
I left it as implied, but I am guessing that I should have made it more explicit in the story, a part of the reason why Taylor jumped on locking in her charges on Crafting (Geneforge), was because the very first roll attempted to give her a greenhouse with her power.
Not a crafting skill, not a body boost, not even something in the warehouse that could be directly useful in someway in her eyes.
But a green house.
She rather certain there is good other perks she can get in the list, and they are not all bad like the greenhouse, she did get healing after all.
She had no idea what the other perks are. The only things she know the certain details is what she already had. She has a vague idea of any perk rolled but not bought of what it would do, and the name of any branches that her power had touched. But everything else is just blank stars that she had no idea if will give her something awesome, or something useless.
She fears that she might waste charges on things that don't help her right now, and is quite right, that her charges can disappear on more useless things. I make a note to add a line around this in the next chapter after it does happen, as her very next roll gets her Windows from the Personal Reality Supplement, and on the reroll tries and fails to acquire the ground covering from the same. Confirming to her that she was right in doing such to get a starting skill. Now that she has one and what it lets her do, it would take something that looks really shiny and cheap to her to lock it in again. Or something she would pay dozens of charges to secure anyway. Taylor is going to instant lock in anything that looks like master immunity, precog protection and other such perks when they come up, without any care for costs. Masters like heartbreaker are rare, but it only takes one for her to lose everything she is.
Taylor allowed to switch on selecting from just a document for the rolls for a x2 to the cost herself. She hasn't done such because she doesn't want to pay the increase, but would have done so had she not pulled something she could clearly use to become a hero like she did.
I didn't consider Taylor making things to exercise with the water portion myself, it is a good idea that I wished I thought about.
I suppose that using Pipes, Pipes, Pipes you could flood a building if you flooded the entrance hall first then opened the door out to let it rush out quickly. Otherwise, you're dealing with something capped at fire hydrant levels of water flow, which is enough to make a mess, but not really enough flow to flood them on it own.
I do have Taylor attending a ward function in chapter 3 of my current rough draft, a basic meet and greet with the public that turns into the main focus of the chapter well she there. She is certain meeting them would be interesting right now, but she sees no safe way to do such. If she goes out of costume she just Taylor and asking the questions she really wants would make even the slowest of person realize that her interest in the wards isn't just public interest but a desire to join them.
Odds that she has powers with that are quite big. To the point she might as well open with, hey I have powers or hey I am a tinker. That would go only slightly better than realizing she a new, unknown parahuman out of costume trying to talk to her. I don't expect it would turn hostile on her, but there be a clear push to get space and delay to make sure she not trying to master them or something first when they realize that.
If she goes out in any sort of costume, even a simple mask, PRT regulations treat unknown capes that approach first without warning was hostile, and the wards are to run away without delay. They make it clear to the public that new and capes unknown locally should not approach wards without being granted permission ahead of time. If they want to talk to them without calling in and arranging ahead of time, stop well away on an official patrol route and wait for them to instruct otherwise.
The Wards are then told and under orders if someone that looks like a masked cape shows up that also looks like they want to talk to them, call it in and don't get close until told otherwise. An adult protectorate member will show up to handle the initial contact and give the okay to come closer if they think it's safe.
Which meant an on the spot grilling by said Protectorate member before they even consider allowing such, and if they don't like your answers you are not talking to the wards that time.
Taylor aware enough that without some reputation beforehand, an unknown girl in costume is going to be treated as possible master trying to take over the ward, or harm them in some other way first, unless she plays the regulations about how to meet them very closely. Something the PRT makes quite clear often on how to do as part of their outreach. If you're a new cape and wish to meet the wards, stop on their official patrol route well away from them, and wait for them to approach you first.
Most of the wards would be friendly and like to talk to a new face without doing such, but even they recall Heartbreaker, and doing such lightly could very much cost them everything on the whim of a new villain.
In this story, I am trying to treat the PRT and other groups as well government organizations with their flaws because of that, still rational about how they handle things. Thus treating their Wards as closer to VIPs and all the security checks that would be required to get close, but not entirely vet every normal person that gets close to them, like they do for the big name officials.
- Location
- Earth
What I don't understand is why of you guys want her to try joining the wards in the first place? Its extremely restrictive, in fact, I am having a hard time recalling a single overall good effect that occurs from an mc joining the wards in all the fiction I have read and am drawing a blank.
Review boards, no high teir tech, exploitation of your tech without proper compensation, control over your time, control over your costume, control over your public appearance, control over where and when you engage, loss of privacy, all your powers limits etc being broadcast to all the villains through the moals, your family being endangered, your identity being revealed, being under the thumb of someone who hates and distrusts parahumans, instant scrutiny from all organizations around the world as now you are a fully public figure under the government.
What does mc gain? Nothing, absolutely nothing. She can get her own materials, she does not need a team, she does not need protection, she flat out gets nothing from joining the wards.
Edit: Not to mention more critically if info about her power goes to the PTR its out of her hands and even if she gains precog protection that info is forever lost to her enemies. More and more weak points.
Review boards, no high teir tech, exploitation of your tech without proper compensation, control over your time, control over your costume, control over your public appearance, control over where and when you engage, loss of privacy, all your powers limits etc being broadcast to all the villains through the moals, your family being endangered, your identity being revealed, being under the thumb of someone who hates and distrusts parahumans, instant scrutiny from all organizations around the world as now you are a fully public figure under the government.
What does mc gain? Nothing, absolutely nothing. She can get her own materials, she does not need a team, she does not need protection, she flat out gets nothing from joining the wards.
Edit: Not to mention more critically if info about her power goes to the PTR its out of her hands and even if she gains precog protection that info is forever lost to her enemies. More and more weak points.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
I agree with your points, and well not every single point is something Taylor herself is aware that she needs to consider, she is also aware that joining the wards means access to a team that would protect her.
The PRT doesn't like it when Wards get hurt by villains, and well most of the time they cover it up, the wards in canon were made to look like they left the fight with the undersiders at the bank unharmed to the public save for the one cape who power made injuries a literal mute point for him. They do their best to make it look like their fights are no more dangerous than after school sports, anything more dangerous than that is given to the Adults.
In this story at least, when a ward is targeted by an outside villain and the outcome of such is something they can spin for the big PR on it, they make a point of having the entire Triumvirate bring in the person who did such, and try to infer that should any villain target a ward or their family. The PRT will do everything short of calling an Endbringer Truce to bring them to justice.
They don't really have the resources to do such, and if it doesn't look like good pr, or you are successful before they learn about it, they cover it up and such.
But growing up as a child, when Taylor heard about wards being attacked, it was followed up by big names like the entire Triumvirate arresting the criminal and due to the training and equipment the ward had, they suffered a broken arm and was in a cast for week sort of deal, maybe even making a big show of another Protectorate hero coming in to heal the ward of their injuries as well.
Taylor is not innocent enough to think it not all a big PR show, but one thing about PR is that you can't build it out of nothing. If too many wards were hurt, or even worse, died, they couldn't maintain the illusion that every attack on the ward get the big guns in retaliation.
As such it is massively safer to go for a protectorate member out of costume then a ward. Taylor knows she needs time to build up, and the wards grants her protection, training in the tools she builds, and likely guidance on what to make next.
I should also add that anything built inside the workshop has the flat protection, not just what Taylor builds. So the PRT could have a master blacksmith go in there and make her stuff. Taylor knows this as well.
If Armsmaster goes and makes his gear in there, it will return to the state it left every single time from any damage or wear or tear.
Which in the case of tinker tech, means it doesn't need any maintenance, unless it degrades to an unusable state within less than 48 hours.
Taylor doesn't fully know this last factor, but she suspects as much herself, and there is a reason why she quite sure she could get any Protectorate city she wants if she joins up as an adult.
With the restrictions it very much a high cost to Taylor, but she can clearly see how it is a high reward as well.
She is not going into them blindly, she is going to look around and learn more about those factors you mentioned as she does such and talks to the wards about how things are in it. She's not going to just join the wards because she had a good run one night in with Gallant or Vista. Taylor is not impulsive enough to do that.
She will give all factors she knows about real consideration, much like an adult should do before they commit to something massively life changing, like joining the military. You are signing up for a lot, but depending on your desires and life situation at the time, you can get a lot out of it as well. Some of my friends joined the army out of high school because their home lives weren't the best, and they were not looking at any good job prospects otherwise, and it worked out great for them.
But not everyone is fit to be a military officer, or an enlisted person.
If Taylor joins the wards in this story, I hope to show that she considered all the negatives and pluses before she does such, and that the pluses really do outweigh the negatives by a large margin. Anything but a very large margin going to have her looking for more information before she open the idea up to anyone outside of her head.
Last edited:
ScottotheUnwise
Verified Crack (fic) Dealer
- Location
- Mulberry, Fl
They already have a big clue to that. She went with her father to the PRT HQ and asked about it. If they didn't already id her face against the photo database of high school students then Dragon is asleep at the wheel. More than likely they are expecting a new cape, a particularly shy female cape around high school age to be making a debut or contact once she firms up her resolve.
Can she change the shape of the floor in the warehouse up and down with her current abilities. She could totally make a water park in there. Lukewarm/mild cold water is actually better for those and she could pipe a rollercoaster using water jets to push a person uphill to follow the rush around to the next turn. Does the Pipes option also let her drain the water out again?
It would then be cool to me if she met up with New Wave and told them she gets power boosts for interaction with capes. Water Park day in her warehouse with the door open to their backyard the whole time. And their Mom could totally use the line about keeping the "door open" the whole time. (parental joke about kids in a bedroom alone)
mute --> moot (sounds alike, meaning vastly different)
- Location
- Earth
Do keep in mind if she shows that repair function and lets the PTR access it all the precogs instantly know they can use mc to do the same too. I can imagine it already, ziz capturing mc to use the WH for her own tinkertech. And logical thinking means mc knows this fact too. Any advantage of sharding this is instantly out the window from the impossibly steep costs, its pretty much suicide.
In addition, I would not be against joining the wards in any other city, but this city is different, where in other cities wards pretty much never really fight major villains, in BB it happens. Coverup or no coverup mc would know about this.
As for them being able to provide guidance, or help for mc is something I don't see happening at all seeing as all of mcs power are not from shards, not related to tinkertech. Any good ideas she could get means she would have to fully reveal her power and even then in a few weeks once she lands a genius perk all that would be moot as she could come up with better stuff herself than anything the local PTR could think up for her.
Revenge against death or injury is worthless compared to the injury or death itself, better to be lower profile than fully known and attract attacks. Clearly such 'revenge' is never effective seeing as all the villains are still roaming around in the city doing whatever they want.
I am pretty sure mc would not have heard about the wards being hurt and then the big names coming in seeing as the city is a cauldron experiment and the implications therein. Not to mention if she really saw such cases and big names were in town why didnt they clean up the city fully?
You mention the high reward but I still dont see what it is, what can the PRT provide that mc cant get herself in a few weeks/months?
Its also extremely dissimilar to the military as the rewards/costs of joining it are very different in a mundane/worm esk world.
Well mc can investigate I suppose, do a cost benefit analysis, she will find the massive holes in the 'advantages' they provide soon enough if she bothers to look deeply or time passes and she gains more powers.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
You must be thinking of a different story as in this one she hasn't interacted with the PRT in a way yet to flag them.
However you are right that they will quickly figure out who she is. Taylor is going out in costume in the next chapter, so they know there a new cape about. The questions Taylor asks at the meet and greet in chapter 3 is enough to flag her as likely the new cape, but as she hasn't done anything harmful yet, they not going to spend the resources to confirm or look into her detailed life history until they realized that they really would love to have her, which all comes up in the interlude that follows that to make it clear that the PRT going to try and figure out a gentle way to make contact with a new cape in a friendly manner.
As for building a water park of some kind, right now, Taylor can't change the shape of her warehouse. With the right perks, she could do whatever she wants. To change the floor she would need something like this perk:
Realistic Ground Cover (-100 WP): Sick and tired of linoleum or concrete? This is the one for you. Now
your Personal Reality floor can be turned into any naturally occuring terrain type, in sections, or roads
and paths of your design. Any dirt or dust that would be created by this is magically taken care of…
unless you don't want it to be.
Or she could just build something by hand if she really wanted to. But that would take her a long time by herself, even if she has endless resources, Taylor's skill and abilities around crafting outside of what Crafting (Geneforge) gives her are entirely of a teenage highschool girl that is not in some shop class.
There some rather big stuff she can get in time, if the dice land that way too, and this is still tiny to what can come up later.
The Village (Requires Sky and Ground plus Trees or Pond on all four sides): Your Personal Reality now
looks like a town in the middle of the woods, or in a mountain valley, or on a cliffside or seaside /
lakeside. Not only that, but you can divide up sections of Warehouse by placing paths or bits of forest or
water between them. This includes all Personal Reality expansions you buy, so if you want your
Olympian Temple on an island off the coast of your village, that's fine. The dividing space can be up to
100x the total footprint of your Personal Reality space, but dividing zones and paths can't be used to
store stuff… it's purely aesthetic
The warehouse starts a pocket dimension and can with the right perks grow into an outright personal planet for her to use, and there is a reason why with the Divinity perk you can pull those that worship you into it when they die. It basically becomes your divine realm, more or less the heaven you grant those that follow you.
- Location
- Earth
Oof, pretty big disadvantage there, so mc didnt realize going up and asking such questions would flag her a cape? Even worse give her civilian identity away? Seems like a terrible move. Though I can see a teen making such a move out of ignorance.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
She didn't think the questions she asked would out her, since she is going to ask thing such as. "Why did you become a hero?" and things of that nature.
The sort of question that some random civilian might ask a protectorate hero. The thing is, when just a few nights before a new cape shows up and someone asking about why someone became a hero at the following event to her appearance, and more critically her very much clear heroic stance without any prior contact.
It isn't that hard to connect the dots that if a shy girl of similar size asking the local heros why they are the heroes is considering joining herself.
Even ignoring all the thinkers the PRT has access to, maintaining any sort of double identity is a pipedream with perfect mundane technology they have access to if they really want to know who you are under that mask, and with the thinkers they could unmask anyone that lacks outright blank or something similar in nature in minutes with most of those minutes being to make sure the paperwork is in order.
What the PRT doesn't do is operate on this information directly. If your notable enough the directors know about it, and it takes some serious access to the PRT to hide someone from them, which is the only reason Director Piggot doesn't know Coil is Thomas Calvert already is because he was able to leverage cauldron control over such to hide him, in much the same way they hide assets they don't want the PRT to know about.
Piggot thinks she knows who Coil is under his mask, but due to Cauldron efforts, it really his body double, rather than himself, which is why his body double always goes in his place to things like the villain meetings about the ABB in canon. It what the 'real Coil' would do after all.
Cauldron has no reason to hide Taylor like they did with Coil as part of his agreement with them in this story, and as such, as soon as she has enough reason to ask for it, Piggot will know Taylor is the hero in question.
However, they are not going to do anything directly or share that around unless she gets a kill order. Piggot will use it in her plans around Taylor's cape ID, but she not going to explain why, just hand out orders to be followed based on what she knows about Taylor from those reports on her.
In this story at least, Coil will get the Empire 88 information directly from the PRT servers if and when he releases it. That is a long way off and things will change, so I doubt it will happen when this story get that far. The PRT already had access to all the data he released, they just couldn't legally act on it until Coil leaked it to the media.
Then it all became free game to act on.
- Location
- Earth
Yup everything in worm is terrible without blank.
Its not like it matters if the PRT will use the info as they are handing it to all the villains to use instead through all the moles. At the very least coil would know pretty fast if the PRT figured it out, which is a pretty big disaster for mc, much less the other gangs.
I guess how it goes depends on what powers mc ends up rolling in the coming chapters.
Last edited:
she was
their
seeing no need... so they would let
turn the hose on
???
scribbles?
??
sign?
park?
up to 2 of the 5 charges she needed to her Locked in perk?
went out as a hero?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
BILLION gallons of water...
My mind went to a fire and the water main breaks so no water. MC installs a fire hydrant in WH. Goes to the fire truck in costume (as a firefighter cape?) and opens a panel door on it into WH and hooks a hose up so they have water. Day saved.
Armsmaster inspecting the compartment later would be amusing.
My mind went to a fire and the water main breaks so no water. MC installs a fire hydrant in WH. Goes to the fire truck in costume (as a firefighter cape?) and opens a panel door on it into WH and hooks a hose up so they have water. Day saved.
Armsmaster inspecting the compartment later would be amusing.
Chapter 02: Expansion + Interlude 01: The Undersiders
- Location
- United States
AN. This one grew a bit more then I was expecting. Before editing it was 10,000ish words with the interlude... I was tempted to split this into 2 chapters, but since I already edited this all and only noticed how long it grew when I came to post it, I figured I just post it together rather then two chapters.
0o0
Chapter 02: Expansion
0o0
On the way home, Taylor was busy designing her armor in her head as she weighed what options she would use. A tiny part of her was unhappy that it was limited to still medieval level technology, as she couldn't make armor that could let her fly or do anything unique in that regard.
With the designs she could create from Infinitely Customizable, she could do some rather impressive things, but that required nanotechnology.
That didn't mean her armor would be completely normal. Not sure what to think about the fact that it ran on magic rather than nanotechnology too much, she focused more on what it would be and less on how it would get there, even if she couldn't help but use the magical terms it wanted her to put it under.
It would be enchanted armor that would make her anywhere from slightly stronger to at least as strong as Armsmaster in his own armor, depending on which options she selected, with the latter being the most time-consuming to make.
Taylor first real debate with herself over her future gear was over the base material that she would use in the end. She could create all of her equipment 'shaped' as her power called it, or she could make it out of Puresteel.
Making her gear shaped was a lot faster when it came to construction time. Fast enough she could get a basic set done and head out on patrols this evening. Whereas if she used Puresteel it would be closer to month, 2 weeks if she managed to use every waking movement to build it to the point there was no way her father would miss what she was doing.
There were other factors as well, although the most clear one didn't apply to her so long as she built her armor in her workshop.
She didn't need to build it there, but anything she did would auto-repair such outright vaporization would be undone in 48 hours and lesser damage would heal in a relative fraction of that time.
Eliminating one of the main purposes of shaped equipment, because although it wasn't biological in nature, at least the stuff she both had access to and was willing to even consider that was there were some plans that were purely biological she very quickly ignored; It would still self-heal slowly so long as the damage wasn't too extreme.
Enough damage, and it would be destroyed and had to be rebuilt completely.
Made outside her workshop that was. When made inside her workshop, this was completely moot point, unless she enchanted a shaped material to self-repair faster, meaning she couldn't use anything else to make it more useful for it very purpose of existing; The very nature of making it in her workshop would already repair it faster and far more completely than a shaped material could ever repair itself.
Two factors warred in her head, First was time, and the second was quality of the end gear.
Puresteel was orders of magnitude stronger. It couldn't be made to self-repair as its nature was very different from shaped gear. But because of this different nature, it could hold much stronger enchantments, and to layer these in, took a lot longer time. And that was ignoring the fact that the nature of being made in her workshop would cause it to self-repair anyway, so the lack of self-repair was a moot point.
It only took a few seconds to make up her mind. It was better to make her armor stronger, then to worry about how quickly she made it. No one knew she had powers yet, so there was no danger to making the best she could first. She set the timeline for when she went out on patrol, she didn't need to buy anything but time to make her armor.
Her random salvaging for parts had been the only thing she did that could have linked her to be a tinker, and she was careful enough to not be noticed.
Taylor had considered her plans for the next few weeks set, until she felt her power warning her. Causing her to come to a stop as she focused on the message she was getting, which had surprised her given the contents of such and the lack of the same on other days so far.
Her power was warning her that it wouldn't give her charges for the timeframe that she was building her armor if that was what she wanted to do. It wasn't interesting to it watch her smelt Puresteel and hammer it into an armor and weapon in the forge.
If she wanted to keep making charges well, she was working on that, she would have to do something else in that timeframe.
Which was a very strong suggestion to use the weaker material, so she could get out faster.
On careful consideration, Taylor decided that with the perks she already owned, even if she had little idea of that the rest were; The dangers of going out in less than her best when it came to armor, wasn't worth the extra charges she would get by going out faster.
She had to be alive to use them after all.
At the thought of the perks she had, her thoughts turned to Infinitely Customizable as she recalled it worked on weapons and tools and was curious if she could combine them to upgrade her armor even more while, she was making it.
With both perks at the forefront of her mind, Taylor was stunned when she felt the two blend and reach out, focusing on the other and something created by both entered her mind.
Rather than the nanotechnology based 'power nodes' that Infinitely Customizable was supposed to use, and she had been fighting to get it to work without those, the two working together would let her craft 'power gems' that would act the same as Power Node could on anything under the domain of Geneforge crafting.
Though the use of this, she could take what was already some impressive enchantments on her gear to the next level. Enough to make shaped gear as good as Puresteel, and items made of Puresteel beyond anything that was possible by that perk alone.
It still wasn't enough to make armor that could let her fly, and her armor and weapon would be limited to 4 upgrade categories at the most with a bonus item 'perk' that well she could select, did have to be related to its function in the item in question and required that all upgrade categories were completely filled before it would take effect.
A capstone for her gear basically.
*Power Buy Attempt 2.4.1 Windows (50). Bought. Banked 50 points. *
Reroll since last perk was fully bought/ bought to some level of ranking and points > 0
*Power Buy Attempt 2.2.3 Realistic Ground Cover (100). Not Bought. Banked 50 points. *
Taylor paused in her steps home as her power surged and went out for new perk, or rather perks, as it tried for a second one when it got the first one but failed to get such. Both under her warehouse, and as soon as she saw what they were she let out a sigh, only confirming in her mind that she had made the right choice in locking in her prior selection even with the cost increase.
Her powers clearly had some nice perks, but it also had some rather useless ones. The useless ones were cheaper, so they wouldn't hurt as much. But given what she got out of her armor, she only confirmed that the charges she had lost as a tax were not wasted, when she could have ended up spending those charges on this like this.
Although her perks were randomly selected, these two had a theme with each other of making her warehouse look nice. The one it did pick up let her place windows that showed the outside world, but not in a way that would let her spy on anything.
The best she could do was get a skyline of Brockton bay, and unless something major was happening like an Endbringer attack, or someone decided to level half of the city, she wouldn't be able to tell what was going on there. It was just a nice view, nothing more.
The perk she didn't get, would have it let her change the ground in her warehouse to something else. Not worthy to lock in, so she left it alone.
The windows might have some use, likely but just letting her see if it was still light out well she was working, so it wasn't entirely useless to her.
Just not useful enough to mean anything in terms of a fight or information gathering, so she returned her thoughts returned to crafting her armor.
She was limited to four boosted categories on her armor with Infinitely Customizable, but she could define what those were so long as they fit the theme of the item in question. Theme was rather broad as well. Besides protecting armor could be upgraded to boost her physical abilities rather than just its protective nature.
Taylor knew she wanted protection so that selection was locked in without question. Her armor was supposed to protect her after all and every bit she could add on would be more than worth it cost in gold. Boosting strength made sense as well. It meant she could hit harder or move heavy things as needed. In that same token, agility, so she could move around easy and quietly in it was a good third one to select.
The fourth was harder. She could add in fire resistance and with a full upgrade tree on it, it would make her close to very resistant to fire, she would need to consider actions like stepping into a steel forge before it could hurt her, or she could add in healing on herself well she was wearing it. That would take about an hour to fully heal her and wouldn't undo maiming injuries, but anything she could recover from naturally would be healed in an hour, rather than even the days she still needed with her healing ability in the worst cases.
Taylor couldn't make her armor more resistant to bullets, that was covered under general resistance.
There were clear pros and cons to both, since running into Lung was a runaway as fast as she could regardless of how much fire resistance she had. Furthermore her own healing perk wasn't going to be fast enough to noticed in combat, where a healing enchantment could be.
But doing so would mean she wouldn't be able to resist being hurt in the first place.
She was better off making clothes that did that and wearing them afterwards to heal up if her own healing ability wasn't good enough to handle how she got hurt after a fight.
Or just wear them under her armor and get both effects? Could she even do that?
Taylor carefully considered what her perks were telling her as she tried to see if she could do that, and to her surprise realized that she could layer them like that. But with restrictions.
Infinitely Customizable did assume that she wants some sort of under layer that she placed armor on over such, and they could be upgraded separately. However, in order for the upgrades to affect her, she had to lose a slot on each to link them up, as those upgrades would be to connect the gear together. Meaning rather than 8 slots between the two, she had six. Well a third layer could get her to 8, if she did such, things got a lot more complicated as she either needed to connect all of them, bringing her down to six again defeating the point of a third layer outside of gaining the option of a third perk for her gear, or take some very careful layering with restrictions as to not have her gear destroy itself from the unconnected items effecting her.
It was possible, but would require a lot of careful design and testing that her powers couldn't just let her bypass. Where if she used 2 layers, she could just treat it the same way as 1 and not need to do any testing.
Redesigning her gear with this in mind, and keeping it to 2 layers for now as it was far simpler, she added an under layer of clothes that after some though in her head, was designed for when she was in armor, and she would make a second set of clothes for when she was out, given she couldn't make a single set of clothes that did both with everything she wanted.
For her clothes in gear, she settled on healing, fire resistance and what amounted to a life support system giving her a limited oxygen supply which was only a few minutes worth, but would autofill as soon as she was in any breathable air.
The last one puzzled her a bit, since Infinitely Customizable was letting her do that, and she wasn't quite sure how it had pulled that out of Geneforge when mixed, since nothing in Geneforge would let her do the same.
For the perk on her underclothes, she added in an auto-triggered stabilize on herself, so if she somehow got hurt bad enough to be bleeding out, it would stop that. Not something she ever wanted to do, but it was the best of her options for perks on that given that it was going to have another layer of gear on top, which restricted what she could place on it.
For the armor proper, she put protection, strength and agility boosting. Due to the link up slot on both the effects of each gear would combine well she was wearing both, making her armor as fire resistant as she would be.
For the perk that her armor would gain when all of its upgrade trees were full, Taylor decided the best one was a perk that let her armor absorb one hit perfectly, but then need a minute to recharge before it could do that again. She could only make it faster if she did not let it block everything that it hit it. And as far as she was concerned, the ability to take an unexpected sniper round to the face was a lot better than a faster shield that wouldn't be able to stop said sniper round as when she could get it to recharge fast enough that people wouldn't have a gap they could exploit well her shield was down, it only made her armor slightly more defensive.
She could think of other things that might be useful, but that seemed like the best option, although she couldn't make it faster, it would be good for a surprise attack.
Lastly, her clothes out of costume, which would have to be shaped because she couldn't make Puresteel look like cloth, would gain protection, strength, agility and fire resistance, on which she put the same one shot protection from any attack that was on her armor.
All five of those would out of her as a cape should something happen when she was out and about, but Taylor put not dying as a valid reason to out herself as a cape if it came down to it.
She would say who she was on public news if that meant never dying in a heartbeat.
The one-shot protection did take something that could break or cause her notable harm. Tripping wouldn't be enough. Sophia hitting her unless it would break her nose wouldn't be enough.
Well that could be an issue if Sophia decided to give her a beating in public, one that was bad enough to break bones, Taylor was not going to take a beating just to stay masked.
New wave was public, and they did fine as heroes after all.
0o0
As Taylor worked on crafting the first upgrade gem to apply to her now shaped clothes that she had made. Starting with the clothes she would wear around town from now on well she was out of costume first, she looked at the piles of gems that were her options to work with, not for the first time wishing she could just take a gem from the pile and sell it.
Any money problems would just disappear if she could.
But she couldn't, and not just because she didn't have a good way to explain where she got it from.
The powers behind her warehouse gave her infinite amount of raw basic materials for crafting only. She could stretch it if she decided to build something outside of her workshop to take something outside, which was how she could build a building outside without needing to figure out how to get out the door afterwards, and still have it effected by her powers, granting it fiat backing to always exist as she had created it and to return to such should anything damage it.
But only if she was intending to use it to build something. Anything from her raw supplies removed from the room for any purpose other than crafting would cause them to vaporize within seconds of leaving. If she changed her mind afterwards it would do the same.
It was entirely based on what she intended to do with such, so if she didn't intend to use it to build something, it would go poof.
She had already tested and confirmed such with the gold bars. If she wanted to take anything to sell out, she had to make it into something first. If she suddenly needed to sell something gold coins wouldn't be hard to make, just melt gold and pour into molds. They wouldn't look good, but they would be real coins and count enough for her to remove them afterwards.
The only way to sell something out of her workshop was to make something to sell first.
Refocusing her attention on her work, her thoughts turned to the fact her father would be home soon, and what she might do when he got home.
It was sort of painful to think about, but she yearned for a connection to her father that she hadn't felt since her mother died.
But she had no idea how she would do such. Her father had been so distant since her mother died, and even though she was better now, thanks not in small part to her powers, she had no idea how to move them to little more than strangers in the same house, to a family again.
Every meal since she got her powers had been silence that weighed on her heart, uncertain of what to say or do or even talk about to bridge the gap between them.
Taylor didn't think it was lost forever, but she felt like she was looking for a path while she lost in the woods, with no idea where to start looking for answers, and wandering blindly would only take her further from answers.
It didn't help that she couldn't see what to talk about during those quiet meals. Telling him that she had powers had been considered, and Taylor did want to tell her dad she had them.
But was stopped by concerns of what that might lead to.
As much as she wanted to deny it, she was still a child. Her father was her guardian, and if he decided they were moving to Germany, all she could do about it was start learning her German for when they got there.
Which was why Taylor was afraid of what might happen if she told him she had powers.
She wanted to believe that he would respect her desires and when she said she didn't want to join the wards until she knew they were good people; That she would rather wait until she was old enough to join the protectorate, if they were not, and he would accept that and that would be it.
But there was the sliver of a chance he wouldn't accept that, and in what really hurt her to think about because she could understand why he would do it, her father could realize how poor of a father he had been these last few years and just put her into the wards.
And like school, she would have no say about it. He was her guardian and the PRT made it very clear on the advertisements for the wards.
Are you a child that has superpower and wish to make the world a better place with your powers? Ask your parents to enroll you in the wards today.
Ask your parents, not, talk to us about joining.
In the end, she was a minor, and as much as she realized it had to be missing something because she couldn't see anything good happening if you forced a child with super powers in the wards against their wishes, the fact that it was stupid didn't mean it wasn't the law.
A sliver of a chance, no matter how small, was too much before she knew the state of the wards. If she was ready to sign up, she would tell him without any hesitation.
But until then, it was not a topic they could talk about.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.1.5 Scanner (Iji) (200). Not Bought. Banked 150 points. *
Taylor was glad for the distraction as her power tried, although failed to acquire a perk for her. Her thoughts going onto this new perk to study it.
Like with the tags Dead Space and Geneforge before there was a new tag on the end that she didn't get the context of yet.
What Dead Space had to do with upgrades was mysteries to her.
At least with Geneforge she could vaguely see how, as she could make some biological gear if she had the right parts, however most of her gear was anything but biological, so unless you squinted and said shaped gear was biological because it could self-repair, even though it had nothing biological to do with it, it was a poor tag given what it contained.
Iji was even worse than the other tags she had seen before, because she had no idea if that meant anything. Was it a name? Was it a Japanese or Chinese word?
Turning her thoughts to the perk itself, figuring that answer to those tags would only become clear in time, she became aware that this item was a scanner of some sort, not just by it rather clear name but by what it could do.
It could scan for lifeforms in an area around her. That wasn't all it could do, there was more to it than that, but she couldn't get more that out of the perk as it was right now.
Since it was only double the missing charge cost, and she was missing exactly half a charge, meaning one charge to secure this, for a life signs detector of some kind, Taylor had no issue locking it in at that.
Then her thoughts turned back to what else she could talk about with her father.
Powers were out, School was quite clearly out as well, she wasn't returning until February 1st to give the police time to finish their investigation and arrest those reasonable.
At that thought, Taylor tried to recall what she had said to them, unable to remember that week well enough to remember, but she figured she must have told them who had done so.
Or had she? Her dad hadn't said anything about Uncle Alan and Emma.
Taylor paused in her work as she realized that she had thought of Alan as her uncle again, it had been years since she did that, ever since Emma betrayed her.
Why did she even do that, did her power do that?
A bit of internal pondering gave her the answer. It was extremely indirectly. Her honorary uncle hadn't ever hurt her, that was all Emma. She stopped thinking of him as her uncle because of Emma. But when her issues were cleared up when her powers made her a normal adjusted person, she stopped assuming he was responsible for what Emma was doing to her.
Which was why she considered him Uncle again. Aunties Zoe and Anne as well. The links Emma had torn down to her family had been reformed as they had never hurt her.
It had all been Emma.
And she had never even noticed her thoughts around them had changed until now.
Shaking her head, knowing that there was little chance of reconnecting with the rest the family that had been as close as if they were her real aunts and uncles, with Emma as her sister, her thoughts went back to what to talk to her dad about.
School was out. Emma was out. What happened to her was most certainly out.
Taylor couldn't think of anything else to talk to him, nor what else she could do. Touch him to show she cared? He was more likely to freak by the sudden contact from her. A hug would be even worse.
There were no good options, only a list of bad ones, and many uncertain ones that she had no idea where to start.
Turning her thoughts to something she did know how to do, she settled into start forging the armor that would make her a hero.
0o0
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
0o0
Standing before the mirror that her workshop provided her, Taylor stood completely clad in head to toe in her brand-new armor, looking it over and considering if she had to change anything or if it was finally done after a long 3 weeks.
Her very first thought as she looked at it, was that she couldn't believe she had made this gear.
Even she could see it wasn't a masterpiece to anyone with real skill, but it clearly required at least some skill in the craft, far more than an apprentice would have, but nowhere near that of a master. Somewhere in-between the two.
The armor itself was almost plain with how little it had on it. The vast bulk of it was the silver of Puresteel, the only designs on such were the lines made of gold required to allowed her power gems to boost the armor's already impressive enchantments from her power, to the levels that made it outright power armor.
The general shape of the armor was that of a woman. Although when Taylor had started her designs in her head, her power had corrected and removed the boob plate she was expecting to need in a woman's armor. Making her understand as it corrected her design in that factor that wasn't a good idea for protective armor at all.
It didn't mean this metal armor didn't make her look like a man. Thanks to the influences of Infinitely Customizable, it had been able to better shape it to her body, then she could have done with Geneforge on it own.
It wasn't as far as the outright nanotechnology it expected and with that, she could have made her armor look like street clothes, without losing any protection.
But it still had been able to shape it better to her body, meaning that even without the boob plate, there was enough signs from added material and the need to fit her body for full range of motion that no one would mistake her for anything other than a woman in this armor.
To the point that looking at it, even though her hair was hidden in her helmet, she felt far more like a woman than she ever had before. Which she found increasingly weird the more she thought about that given her armor was anything but 'soft or curvy'.
It looked rather intimating to her eyes.
Well very plain, the gold lines that existed solely for the purposes of boosting it abilities, gave the hint that this wasn't just armor and there was something more to it, the gem placed around it as required to boost her properly only reinforced this image.
The biggest being the gem over the center of her chest that was the source of the 'perk' for this armor. It had been one thing that she had tried and failed to move. For a one hit shield, she needed it in the center of the biggest part of the armor.
Even to her unskilled eyes it screamed, attack me here, it is my weak point.
But it wouldn't work if she moved it elsewhere. Even on her shaped clothes she had to do that, but in that case she had made it look like a very poor, but still simple design that made it look more like a glass bead as an eye on the picture of a cat, and less a gem that was the source of her power.
So she was a teenager girl with a bad graphic of a cat on her sweater, no one even gave her a second glance with that.
As much as she tried, she couldn't figure out how to hide it on the armor with her limited skills in doing such right now, her attempts to do such only seemed to draw even more attention to it, not less.
Taylor gaze moved to her hands as she bent and twisted them, shocked at how free her movement in the armor was. This had been one of the areas that Infinitely Customizable managed to help without needing the nanotechnology it expected the most. For some reason it seemed to really like laying metal plates over her fingers in a way that didn't limit their ability to interact with the world, far more than she could have done from Geneforge alone.
Her solid metal gloves felt like they were latex medical gloves with how much she could feel and move them. There clearly was something over her hands, but it didn't feel like sheets of metal unless she looked at it.
At that thought, an impulse had her try to order a command that failed because the system didn't exist yet.
This cause her to laugh out loud as she thought of the retractable helmet her power wanted her to build, it would have been so cool if she had it, but it required such a deep level of nanotechnology that she likely have to beg it off Dragon to get access to, at least until she got the perks that let her make it herself.
Shaking her head, Taylor hand went to the weapon she had made, drawing a long sword and holding it up to the light.
Five gems shown on the blade itself, four of them making the weapon shaper beyond anything she could do without nanotechnology, but it was the fifth one that she intended to make far more use.
It had required a completed tree on an item before she could install it, she couldn't just add a perk to something without at least one customization tree, and the more the trees the stronger the perk could be.
With a thought, the sword lit up on fire.
Taylor had no training with her sword, nor could she figure out how to grant herself training or even direct it by just upgrades.
So she had no intention to ever swing it at a person, at least not until her training in it use let her get somewhere with it first.
It was all for intimidation. If she had to fight, she wouldn't use the sword at all. But she had a feeling a knight with a flaming sword would scare off anyone she wouldn't be running from herself when she recognized them.
Looking in a mirror, she nodded slowly, surprised at how well the metal mask carried her features, even that she didn't even have eye holes open. They were twin shards of pure crystal that due to the rest of the enchantment of the armor shouldn't break any easier than the steel.
It was exactly what she wanted out of this design.
Putting the sword out, she placed it clumsily into its sheath, then started to walk around, feeling how light she was in the armor. She was wearing some 200 pounds of Puresteel, but felt like she was about to take off into the air with each step.
The armor before upgrades doubled her strength and agility. The upgrades doubled those again. She could lift her suit five time over while she was inside it.
The fire resistance she had already tested carefully around a flame, and by the time she was done with the testing she was willing to risk; she had held her hand in the flame and didn't even feel her armor warm up. It would take fire far hotter than her forge could make to harm her so long as she wore it.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.1.5 Scanner (Iji) (200) + 50 Lock in Tax. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
As if it was a reward for finally finishing her armor, Taylor felt her power acquire the scanner she had been promised with that, losing the half of a charge she had laying around as tax for the lock in, and her thoughts turned away from her armor as she made her way over to the device that had appeared in the storage section of her warehouse, no longer needing the mirror of the workshop to evaluate if she needed to make any final changes to her armor.
Well she could see stuff she wanted different; she knew it was beyond her skills to do such right now.
As such, her armor was done, and now she had the one tool that would help her find crime when she went out on a patrol.
Picking up the Scanner, Taylor looked it over knowing not only how it would work, but also the fact that it was backed like items from her workshop to always exist, much like her key.
Like her key, if it was lost or stolen, it would return to her. Only in the warehouse rather than onto her person.
Unlike her key, this took 24 hours to do, where they key would do such in a few minutes.
Much like items made in her workshop, it would self-repair. Only it was faster, taking only 24 hours to fully repair, rather than 48.
As much as she might wish it, items made in her workshop couldn't automatically return to her if lost or stolen, she has to find them the hard way if they were lost. Returning to her if they were lost only applied to stuff her powers gave her, not what she constructed with them.
The only exception was if they were literally tossed out reality. Items cast forth from reality would regenerate and reappear in her warehouse 48 hours later. Taylor knew this, she hoped that she never could find such, even though she had a feeling when her power included instructions on exactly what happened if she were to lose her stuff outside of reality itself.
With the perk backing her, she found it as easy to use the scanner as if she had been born with it in her hand. Knowing every feature, every function every ability as if she herself had designed and built this herself
If she had the right parts, she could have built a copy in her sleep, she could have programmed it the same way.
The perk gave her 'blueprints' for all the parts that made it up her scanner, but that didn't tell her how to turn raw materials into those parts in questions, nor what tools she would need to build them. Only what they would look like when done and what their finished state was made of.
This knowledge was locked to make exactly that, no more, no less. It was enough for her to draw hints with the aid of Infinitely Customizable to build this scanner into the helmet of her armor, provided she had the parts and with the proper nanotechnology that perk expected she had that was.
There was only so much it could do without that.
So in lacking those, it would take research to do anytime soon, but it was research she was more than willing to spend the time on, since it had a clear gain for her, even if there was a chance it would become worthless by a perk she gained before she figured it out.
Given the speeds of perks when she was doing something interesting, she was quite sure that would solve the issue before she could figure out a design herself, but at least it gave her something to work on until then.
Although the perk had hinted this was a life signs detector and it in fact was one, it turned out that the main function of the scanner wasn't to locate people. It was to scan items, by placing it within about a meter and moving the scanner around an item.
In doing such, she got details of the item in question that wouldn't just give her the overall state of it, but the blueprints she needed to make it, and the raw materials used to make each part of said blueprints.
It wouldn't tell her how they were shaped in that way, not if the parts used were the best, but it would give a very big starting point to duplicate whatever she scanned, since she knew everything in the final product and exactly how it was put together.
The life signs detector was a side effect of this ability, rather than it main purpose, allowing it to tell if there was anyone within 100 meters of it, as well as basic topography of the area within the same, and if they were in 10 meters she could tell more about them such as how healthy they were, if they were awake or asleep and things along that vein.
Bring it to within a meter of a person and scanned them like an item, and she would she get detailed medical information on them down to their very DNA, although Taylor could tell she had no idea how to resolve that to anything useful without either waiting for a perk that gave her medical knowledge or a lot of self-study, since her scanner didn't tell her what was wrong, only what it currently was. It would be up to her to figure out dangerous or not, although some basic things would be clear to her even without specialized training.
A doctor would likely get more use out of this on people.
Dragon would likely pay good money for this given what it could do if she got her hands-on tinker tech. A perfect blueprint of whatever tinker tech it scanned, and list of materials used to make it had to be useful to her.
Any tinker for that matter.
Taylor turned the scanner on herself to scan the armor she was in curious of what it would show her.
If she pointed this at herself rather than her armor, she could scan herself down to her DNA. But she had no idea what it would show her around tinker tech like her armor.
The result were quick. And what she found in the results floored her.
She was expecting a blueprint of her armor, the materials it was made of and a listing of the gems she used to upgrade it without any indication how to make them, much like how it would tell her this blueprint used standardized part x, without telling her how to make that.
It did have those, but it wasn't where it ended in the details.
On the gems she had taken, shaped and enchanted with her powers to act as 'power gems', fine details that shouldn't exist were layered inside, details that looked like some sort of circuit board made of runes rather than the shapes she was expecting on such. Somehow both incomprehensible to her, but at the same time when she looked at the pattern she knew exactly what it did.
In the case of the gems, it made them count as a power source to fuel the upgrade. The real source of the upgrade was on the armor itself, hidden in the golden line. Looking at the scan results she could see tiny shapes in what she thought was just straight lines of gold as she laid them in place, now zoomed in to show that it was made of a single thin line with runes on either side connected by other thin lines, the details of which was so fine that to her naked eye it looked like just a single thick line of gold. The nature of these runes and their connecting lines puzzling and hinting to a deeper layer of reality than she knew existed.
But even though the meaning of just one was beyond her, the lines sung to her mind of the ability controlled by that line in question, which upgrade path it allowed her gear to function with.
It made Taylor's head hurt the more she looked at it, since it was like being unable to read the words of a story, but looking at text you had no idea what said, you knew the story, but couldn't point to any part of it and say what it did.
Only what the story in the end was about.
This, more than anything was proof she was a tinker. She had managed to etch nanoscopic effects on her armor and gems with medieval tools. The very nature of her power expressed on the world somehow, by of a detail far beyond that of her scanner's ability to tell her about, only to show her was there before it gave up unable to explain more.
Far beyond her ability to even begin to guess what they all meant.
She could tell from just the glances she saw, these patterns on her armor would be someone's life work to just understand, and she held no chance of doing such without more perks aiding her.
It made her feel so small, as she got a glance of something so tiny, and yet fundamental to the universe, that these tiny lines, let her armor turn anyone wearing it into an effective brute, four times as strong as they were outside the armor.
And to her naked eye, it just looked like some gems and some lines made of gold on armor.
This was what it meant to be a tinker. To forge the technology of the future with the tools of today, or in her case, the tools of yesterday.
Taylor's thoughts turned back to the PRT. She might not have examined anyone else's tinker tech, but something in her told her that hers wasn't different than others, which made her wonder.
Did the PRT even know about these runes? What they would give her for just this scanner? How much would they be willing to give her for these plans. For a device that could show the hints of how tinker tech broke the laws of physics?
She didn't know, but she had a feeling it was getting up there in what she could swing.
Inspired, she turned her scanner on her kiosk that would provide her the recordings of her life, curious what that would show up.
She was not expecting the answer on her screen with that at all. It wasn't blueprints, it wasn't even a picture of it.
It was a single word.
'No'
Whatever god or gods had given her this power, made it quite clear that she wasn't going to get anything from that.
Which only made her wonder if she ever learns who did this to her, as she looked around the warehouse, becoming acutely aware this was all designed by some greater power and given to her with structure and rules she barely understood.
But all of it had a reason behind it, this was not some random chance, even the fact she was given her perks at random was done with intention and design.
It felt humbling to her, as it only confirmed there were beings out there that were literal gods next to her, ones that had chosen her for some reason.
Taylor had no idea what it was, but she hoped it was to be a hero, she did want to be one. But it only brought an undercurrent of concern. If this was what they felt she needed to be a hero, what was her foe?
The only one that came to her mind was the Endbringers. Given the bare hints of what she could grow into that she had, where she might end up and the thoughts that all of this was what was required to destroy one terrified her soul.
This was what was required to kill one of them?!?
*Power Buy Attempt 1.4.3 Strategic Mastery II (100). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
The gaining of a new perk help draw off the terror she was starting to feel, as Taylor felt even if it wasn't her power telling her such, her foes were great, but her power would be enough if she was smart about it. If she used strategy that was.
Which made her wonder how random her power was with how perfectly timed that was, right as she was starting to panic, right as started to wonder how she could handle such a big task, knowledge of strategy filled her mind. Everything from squad tactics, to both long- and short-term strategy and how-to best lead people that followed her.
With it, she could already feel vague suggestions to her long term plans that it brought to better refine them.
The perk wasn't done, there was another level hiding behind it, she could lock in. But the perk itself suggested that was a poor idea as the gains from a new perk would far outstrip the minor refinements to plans a better version of this could do.
Having more options led to far better plans then deeply refined plans with lesser resources. You didn't need to be a Strategic mastermind to win a battle when your foes had wooden sticks and you had fighter jets. And even the best Strategic mastermind couldn't win that in reverse, unless you defined win as not die and just hide until they gave up.
Because of that, she didn't lock in the next level, as her thoughts went to her own personal long term plans, seeing what suggestions it made, noting that made each one clear, even if she agreed with them she knew that they were not from herself but her powers, and she still had to choose to accept them.
Her long-term plan of joining the Protectorate was fine, but some things she had done to that end needed to be revised according to it.
She had just assumed she would find a team she was happy with, but never tried to figure out which team.
She wanted to learn how the wards were but hadn't done anything more than basic research on that front.
Her strategy had flaws, mostly minor flaws rather than fundamental flaws, but they were flaws she needed to correct if she was going to make progress on her goals.
The goal her perk suggested on focusing due to it time limit was evaluating if she wanted to join the wards or not, and outside of lacking gear she wanted to bring along in case something went wrong, her new power didn't find any real flaws in her goals.
As a rule the PRT made quite clear to the public, unless you followed very specific rules about engaging with them. The Wards treated new and unknown capes as extremely hostile, as if they were some unholy combination of Jack Slash and Heartbreaker.
Deviate from that narrow line, and it was assumed you were attacking the wards. So follow the rules on how to meet them, or else.
Her desire to build a reputation first was sound, because with heroic deeds to her names, the Wards wouldn't have to treat her like heartbreaker 2.0, who was going to master then and run away with whatever force was required to do such, the second they saw her.
They could just talk to her. But only after she had a reputation. Once they knew her overall powers and that she was hero, things became a lot easier, and she could just walk up to them on the street and talk to them in costume.
Out of costume wasn't an option for rather clear reasons.
Starting to build her reputation first was a reasonable first step to her goal of joining the wards if they were acceptable, since it also supported all of her other long-term goals as well. If she was going to tell the Protectorate what team she would join, it would be much easier if she was a known hero with good deeds to her name already.
0o0
That night, Taylor waited until after her scanner reported her dad was in a deep sleep, before she made her way downstairs.
Her enchanted clothing made her footsteps as light as a cat, and on making certain she was alone before she went out the back door, made her way out.
Despite the fact she could have used her sensor to make sure no one was around when she left in full costume, and she could move surprisingly silently in her armor thanks to the upgrades, she knew that her scanner could be fooled, and it was safer to change away from her home.
Just because the sensors wasn't showing anyone nearby, did not mean there was no one nearby. It could be fooled trivially if you knew how and even by accident in some cases.
So, she went a short distance from her house, watching the scanner as she went, before making her way to a locked door to use it to access her warehouse, quickly changing into her costume before walking back out into the cool night air.
Looking around for the first time in armor, she considered how she was going to do this.
She needed to get within 10 meters to know any more details than some life form here and was currently set to that it did require enough 'life energy' that she wouldn't pick up on anything that wasn't human or human like unless it was unusually massive.
Human sized animals didn't count, unless they were of at least human intelligence. Things that were smarter had more 'life energy' which was what the scanner picked up on to tell it was a person and not a rock shaped like a person.
Well she could let it show her all life, she didn't see any reason to get a list of bugs, dogs and cats about, and the odds of a random bear or any human or large size animal in downtown was slim enough she considered it a reasonable risk.
Her plan was simple enough, she would make her way to the boardwalk, then to downtown, before heading back home. Swing closer to any life signs to get a general health check and only close in more if she found something wrong. It seemed reasonable and her Strategic Mastery didn't find any glaring flaws in it either.
Turning to face the boardwalk, she made her way into the night, her first ever patrol as a hero.
0o0
It took Taylor a few more times than she would ever admit to anyone later, to realize that life signs in a store after hours did not mean criminal inside the store robbing the place.
Nor was there some massive crime wave hitting the boardwalk that night, just because there was someone in every store. That was just the night security forces doing their jobs, and she was extremely happy she figured that out before she ambushed one of them and tried to arrest them for robbing the same store, that they were in charge of protecting.
Things didn't get that better on that end as the next group turned out to be just homeless seeking shelter from the freezing weather outside in abandoned buildings.
Criminals given they were legally trespassing by staying there, but not something she wanted to respond by kicking them out.
She rather build them a shelter they could stay in, but she couldn't do that right now, so she just left them along, trying not to think about how bad this city was and how much there was to fix.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.1 Thanatologist (200). Not bought. Banked 100 points. *
Taylor stopped in her patrol as her power rewarded her with a charge and tried to acquire a perk, only to open her eyes wide as what it had failed to her entered her mind.
The word Thanatologist wasn't known to her before, but what it did was still passed on. It was skills around the creation of the undead. As in, it required dead people to use.
Taylor nope out of selecting that one and for the first time since she got her power was extremely pleased that she hadn't gotten a perk given the context of that. It was far worse than worthless, she rather get her windows perk a thousand times then get that one again.
Well she was trying to focus on how to make her power never try and give her that again her sensor went off indicating that a life sign was moving quickly. Every time before it had been a person in a car driving nearby, but she studied it anyway just in case it wasn't that this time.
Finding a figure on a path that would take them out of range within a few seconds due to it angle to her and was moving very quickly.
Giving the map of the area put whomever it was in an alleyway, rather than on the street, Taylor started to move in their direction a bit, only to start running when two more figured appeared behind it, slightly faster.
Her heart soured as she realized what this meant.
Her first ever crime she would stop, on her first night out.
Taylor felt quite pleased, only to bite that down. She was a hero, she should be happy if she didn't find crime when she went on patrol, not pleased that she did.
Even if her powers like it, since she could tell she had gotten a fair amount of her next charge already, not even minutes after she got the last one. This was extremely interesting to her benefactor.
Rushing at full speed into the night, she didn't sound like a woman in armor giving chase, rather her hurried pace would have had anyone that saw her in person look to see if perhaps they had lost their hearing given most animals made more noise than she did running.
But as fast as she was, she had started far enough away that the two figures giving chase to the first were just fast enough that before Taylor got there, they managed to grab whoever it was. Stopping the third where they had met up.
Taylor paused when she got within 10 meters range a few seconds later as they were stopped, and she wanted a bit more information.
The one that had been running was a woman, and at this range her scanner could say she was slightly injured, well the two chasing her were both men that were also slightly injured as well.
Her scanner couldn't tell her more than that at range, and Taylor had to pause as she saw all three individuals were injured slightly as a thought crossed her mind.
This could have been a criminal running from two police officers that caught her. She should try and figure out what was going on before she showed herself if she could. No need to add assaulting a police officer catching a criminal to her list of crimes she almost did that night after all.
It was easy enough to move forward silently, as Taylor peeked down the alleyway that they had caught her.
Even in the dim light, Taylor could tell that they were not police officers, given they clearly had ABB gang markings on them.
Taylor could see that they had the woman on the ground with duck tape over her mouth and were currently tying her up.
Not police officers Taylor noted to herself, as she stepped forward and decided to call out a warning.
"Stop what you are doing."
Taylor winced to herself as soon as she said that, it sounded a lot better in her mind then out of her mouth. It was more of a squeak, and she was quite sure how nervous she was quite clear.
The two men looked at her, clearly expecting a bystander.
Taylor could see the exact instant they realized she wasn't likely a bystander on their faces given her armor.
"Cape!"
They both turned and ran away from her, one of them stepping hard on to the woman with a thud that didn't sound good to Taylor, and they booked it.
As much as Taylor wanted to give chase, she was worried about the woman, more so after one had stepped on her chest with a thud.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.30 Private Reality (600). Not Bought. Banked 200 points. *
Too concerned about the woman to focus on what the perk she had missed was, Taylor rushed to the woman, only vaguely noting that the perk it had missed had to do with her warehouse size in some way, which most certainly wasn't anything that might let her help her right now.
Kneeling next to the already bound woman who was clearly in pain, she ran her scanner over her. It had listed her as moderately injured, and she was bleeding in minor amounts under the skin over a large part of her body.
Touching the woman to activate her healing touch, she tried to consider what to do next.
She could see fear in the woman's eyes, which made her pause only long enough to realize that it was because she hadn't already untied her, and likely assumed that she wasn't much better off under her then the two gang members. Most capes were villains after all.
That at least was something that was easily solved, as she reached for the woman, who was doing her best to try and slid away from her, but as she was bound on wrists and legs with duck tape over her mouth, she couldn't move that quickly.
Turning her over gently, feeling her shake under her touch, and not strong enough to stop Taylor from turning her over to access her wrists, Taylor then held her arm with one hand, then carefully withdrew the knife she had on hand, so she didn't have to her use sword to cut things. Using it to cut the duck tape as carefully as she could without hurting her.
Once freed, Taylor let go and moved a step back as her hand flew up to her face to tear off the duck tape over her mouth.
As she did such, the fear and panic that was in her eyes faded away to more wariness.
With a wince she yanked the tap off and then went for the binding on her legs, without taking her eyes off her savior.
"I don't think I heard of you before, who are you?"
Taylor started to answer, stopped when she realized she was about to say 'Taylor', then went wide eye as she recalled she hadn't picked out a cape name yet.
All these weeks with her powers, and she hadn't even considered that she needed one.
Desperate for anything to change the topic, she saw the woman trying to get the tape off.
Taylor turned her knife around, so she was holding it by the blade, and offered the handle to her.
The woman had frozen as she started forward, only until she saw how it was handled. Then she took it and cut her own legs free.
"Are you not able to speak for some reason?" She asked as she started to move, only for Taylor to recall what her scanner had said.
"Don't move your're hurt."
The woman stopped trying to get up and asked. "How badly?"
"Moderately."
"I meant exactly how am I injured?"
"I don't really know ah…" Taylor gaze shot to the scanner, and she repeated what it said. "Bleeding under your epidermis layer… your skin."
"I certainly took a few bruises, but I would be more concerned with internal bleeding other than that kind. Is there something else?"
Taylor studied the scanner hoping it would somehow inform her how to answer the woman's question.
"Is that data on your scanner something I can read?"
Deciding that was better, she handed it over to the woman to look at.
She looked at the data quickly, eyes going wide making it extremely clear how impressed she was with what she was reading, then she focused entirely on what it said, poking at it a bit before she asked.
"What other injuries do I have?"
"Only what it says there. I don't really know what they mean other than you have them."
"So you saw it said moderate and thought I was dying?"
"Ah, not quite? More like you could make it worse if you moved too quickly or something."
"Before the EMTs get here." The woman noted.
With that, a second thing she had forgotten to do hit Taylor like a freight train.
She didn't have a cell phone on her, she hadn't even considered getting such, wondering how she forgotten something as basic as a cellphone with Strategic Mastery, she was immediately rewarded with the answer.
Strategic Mastery didn't make her ability to plan perfect. It could refine things she had considered, but it couldn't outright tell her things she had forgotten to completely consider herself.
She wanted to bring along a list of items in case someone was hurt, so it had informed her of what to bring, but a cell phone to call for emergency services hadn't entered her mind.
"Did you call them?" the woman asked when she didn't get an answer after a bit.
"No I… It my first night out, I didn't really think to bring a cell phone." Taylor admitted to her.
"I got mine, but is everything on this scanner of yours, everything that iswrong with me?"
"It is."
"In that case, I'll just walk back to the hospital."
"Back?"
"You do know where you are right now, right?"
At the shake of a head, the woman sighed and informed her.
"A few blocks from Brockton Bay General Hospital, I'm an ER Doctor there. Doctor Susan Yamamoto. They tried to grab me as I was returning to my car to head home after my shift. I couldn't have run more than a few blocks. Mind escorting me there?"
"Not at all." Taylor agreed, that was way easier than considering everything she did wrong right now.
Susan got up and handed the scanner back to Taylor, then asked.
"What is your name anyway?"
Deciding that walking the entire time quietly might not be a good idea for that question, Taylor returned a simple answer.
"I haven't picked one yet."
Shock filled Susan's face as she looked at Taylor, then gave her a good long look up and down, clearly not believing such from the look on face, only reinforced by her words that followed.
"With power armor that good? That good of a scanner that looks like something we get from a medical supply center rather than junk glued together? I only seen such on Protectorate Tinkers. Big name Protectorate Tinkers."
Taylor didn't answer, rather she turned her head away in shame.
"Hey, it okay. I get picking a name is hard. I got two kids of my own, and I had to spend months before I knew what to name them, barely knowing before they were born. I suppose it's even harder for capes given they can't just pick what they like. Naming my daughter the same as someone in the Protectorate wouldn't see me in jail."
A silent nod was all that was returned to that.
"First night out huh?" Susan noted after she realized there would be no reply from her savior to that.
Another silent nod.
"Then you don't know about the unwritten rules?"
"The what rules?"
"The unwritten rules, I might as well tell you about them on the way back. The rules are simple but keep one thing in mind. They are called unwritten rules, because they only have as much legal weight behind them as the local capes as a whole, heroes and villains choose to respect them. If you ask the PRT about them, they say that the Unwritten rules are gentlemen agreements only and hold no bearing on the law. But only those quite certain they can take anyone else nearby would dare outright break them. If you follow them, capes that also follow them will do the same to you. If you don't they don't."
After a pause to let it sink in, the older woman continued.
"The rules are simple. Don't maim or murder, don't rape, don't unmask anyone, don't go after families. They get a lot more nuanced after that, since it's entirely on what the locals agree they are. So every town has additional ones, but those that follow those four are generally considered proper and go to normal jail if arrested for a crime. Those that don't go to the Birdcage or are outright executed on capture."
"Villains and Heroes?!?"
"You easily can kill in the self-defense of someone else, but that doesn't change the fact legally it's murder until the courts rule it self-defense. I hope it's only the last two I need to really tell you not to do. But let's start with the first as you might find the need to do such to protect someone. Although the rule is don't maim or murder, it better said as don't escalate. If they bring police batons, you don't bring knives. If they bring knifes, you can bring knives but don't bring guns and such. Most capes fight with blunt weapons or bare hand because of this. Besides being safer for you, it is also safer for them. A villain you are arresting know there is little danger of being accidentally killed if they don't have a weapon, but if you're known for bring around that sword of yours, you are going to see people always using knifes and swords on you in return. But not guns. Not unless you bring one first."
"Oh, that makes a lot of sense."
"Yes, but it not the law. You don't have to do that, self-defense does justify killing in the right situations, but if you are known to do not endanger people enough that they could die fighting you, then those you fight won't push you to the edge and risk killing you as well. I am going to assume you're a decent person and I don't need to cover the second rule in any depth whatsoever, so the third one is easy enough. Well it only illegal to unmask heroes that are listed as such by the PRT. Even the PRT respects the unwritten rules in this regard, so they don't unmask people until they get kill orders, which is why despite the fact that Empire 88 been in this city for years, no one outside of them knows who Kaiser is. If the PRT couldn't tell with all the thinkers they got on hire, they should fire them all and replace them. They know, but since unmasking a cape opens both them and their families to retaliation, they don't do such until they decided you are better off dead. Capes that snub that one tends not to last long, because the villains will gang up and take them down, and the Protectorate generally lets them without interfering. It might not be law, but it keeps things safer, when the villains don't think that they can't just take off their mask and give up a life of crime, that when they jump to the outright murder of victims rather than bruises they can heal on their own in a few weeks. Desperate people do desperate things."
The pair arrived near the hospital and Susan finished with.
"Just don't forget it not a law you can invoke unless you can get the local criminals to agree with your version of the events. How much force it has is as much as those who respect it around here gives it, no more no less. That the rules in a nutshell, and all you need to know since they more of a gentlemen's agreement and not law. I should get inside and get myself checked over."
With that, she started to move inside, but stopped when Taylor spoke up to address her.
"Before you go."
"What?"
"Do you know why they grabbed you?"
"That? Likely because of my husband, he is Japanese after all."
The woman in question was clearly white and as far as Taylor could see, if it wasn't for her black hair would have fit in nicely with the Nazi's ideal race. She had lovely blue eyes now that she could see them in the light of the hospital. It wouldn't be a simple job to make her blonde with how dark her hair was, but if she had blonde hair, she would have been the picture of an 'average ideal woman' by their standards. She wasn't even remotely a model in appearance, but good enough looking to basically be a stand in on a tv show sort of deal.
"They wanted to recruit him by kidnapping you?"
"It is more likely not slurring the bloodline by stopping him from being with a Gaijin." Susan replied. "One of the good things of not being my husband's biological daughter is my eldest, Mei, doesn't get recruited by them and my youngest Shiro only in the 3rd grade, so he is way too young to do such yet. It is not the first time this happened, although they caught me this time, normally I get away when some new recruits into the ABB decide I am a good target to prove they are worthy of the gang."
"Normally?" Taylor repeated at that.
"Brockton Bay is a shithole, I guess you new the area if you didn't know that. I don't know what brought you here, but you might want to move onto a more peaceful city. If you're not white, Empire 88 will hate you, if you're not Asian the ABB will hate you and if you are neither they both be gunning for you. I should go get checked out, thank you again for saving me from them, you likely saved my life."
Taylor watched the woman make her way into the hospital but didn't follow, the fact that she could qualify the outcome of being kidnapped by the ABB because of her husband as normally escaped, somehow made this city seem a whole lot darker than it had been before.
She knew Brockton Bay was a horrible place on Earth, but surely a woman in the city shouldn't be subjected to attempted kidnappings enough to need to qualify that normally her kidnapping to be tortured to death, ended up with her getting away.
0o0
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
0o0
*Power Buy Attempt 3.6.7 Profession: Tailoring (Zen Master) (World of Warcraft) (300). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Taylor was woken up by her power activating and giving her a new perk. After flaying around in bed a bit due to the suddenness of how she was woken up, she managed to regroup enough to understand what had woken her, and that she wasn't under attack by anything other than her power making her stronger.
Looking quite the mess between how tired she still was, her random flaying in her bed doing no good for her appearances either. She found only hazy memories of waking up to see her dad off before going back to bed, telling her what had happened after she got home, she looked over at the clock to see it was just before noon.
She was still ready to sleep for at least a few more hours.
Yawning, she considered her new perk, wishing it was something to let her need less sleep. She was going to need to do shorter patrols otherwise and given the very last thing had been saving Susan's life last night, she would have been kidnapped, likely raped and killed had Taylor not been there.
Which meant she had done a lot of good, but unless she solved the issue of sleep, she wasn't going to be able to keep doing as much good when she had to start going back to school.
The haze faded from her mind as she understood what her new perk was, and it was quite impressive.
She had gained a supernatural ability at tailoring, that made her a Zen master in that craft. Unrivaled in by her peers, so long as it was something made of cloth.
Although it brought no ideas of fashion with it, she could tell that if she had a design, she could make any outfit she was asked to do such. As such, anything she made would have the qualify to be fit for a central piece in a major museum exhibit, should she decide she wanted to do that. All she needed to be told was some rough image of the final product and she could turn it into a work of art.
The far more useful side of this was the fact she could now make outright magical items, so long as they were made of cloth. Bags that were bigger on the inside, carpets that could fly. Clothing that didn't have to be shaped to be enchanted with basic effects.
What more, she could drop the need for using gold thread in her clothing as she could encase the enchanting into normal thread, meaning that careful examination of her gear wouldn't show she had gold running through it.
It was much better for her than the perk she had decided to abandon last night that would have just made her warehouse larger.
Space was not something she was lacking in her warehouse right now, nor at the rate of her tinkering might not ever be a concern in her lifetime unless she started collecting a lot of stuff made by other people.
Or her powers gave her some big things.
Looking down at her bed, debating how much she wanted to sleep more versus getting up and reworking her clothing to be much better now that she was no longer limited by shaped items, a thought passed her mind that made her pause as she refocused on the collection of these three perks.
She could make magical cloth, and anything related to magical cloth, which included blankets that would let her sleep soundly and comfortably no matter how rough the location she wanted to sleep in.
On it own it was useless if she wasn't camping, since her bed was comfy enough on it own to be luring her in with promises of its warmth cuddling her.
But that perk didn't have to make alone, drawing on the power gems she could make from the combination of Geneforge and Deadspace, then drawing on dead space again to allow her to upgrade a tool within it function, she could upgrade her bedsheets to make her sleep better.
As in, she would need much less sleep to be fully rested.
Four levels of upgrades would be limited to about an hour off the time she needed at best, but she could perk this within the same upgrade for an effective 2 upgrades.
Cutting her time required for sleep down to 2 hours per night.
That was more than enough to get her out of bed to go start on such, only pausing as she recalled the fact that Susan had pointed out she didn't have a name, and she didn't have a cellphone.
Both were issues to resolve, but after she made her blankets of restful sleep, she wouldn't be able to go out tonight as a cape anyway with how tired she was, and without those and a nap, it didn't matter if she had them or not.
0o0
By the time Taylor finished her bedsheet of restful sleep, and put them to very good use in an afternoon nap, it was too late to head out to the library to look up capes, and lacking the internet access at home, she had no option but to wait until tomorrow.
Likewise, cellphone shopping was off the table as well.
Thanks to said sheets, she wasn't able to fall asleep either, so she waited until after her dad was asleep to make her way into her workshop to start remaking her clothes, frowning as she looked at how the cheap mass-produced cloth made up her outfit offended her powers.
She knew the stuff was cheap, that was half the reason she bought it, but her powers felt like they were being insulted if she wore something like this.
Taylor sighed at that, not wanting to wonder what sort of extremely fancy dress she had to wear to make her powers happy about her clothes and how she would ever get away with it in school, only to pause as told her it didn't need to fancy. They didn't care what her clothes looked like.
Just that they were not made like the crap. She would make far better herself by pure accident. Half thrown together dresses to just test for ideas would look far better than her clothes right now. Forget anything she tried to make look good.
The tailoring ability from the perk was powerful enough that even if she had no idea of fashion, whatever she made would at least look decent, and if she did know fashion, she could easily get the big name people wanting her to make outfits for them.
Considering this and deciding there was no reason not to remake them completely, as she wanted as much protection on her as she could get all times. It was also easier than breaking it up her existing clothes and remaking them as magical items, so she settled in to start to do such, only to stop mid cut of a bolt of cloth when her power activated again.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.2.4 Mental Resistance II (100). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
With a sharp breath, Taylor realized what she had just been handed, the fact there was another level to it, and she locked it in several times to make sure she didn't forget to do such. Then doubled checked again to make certain she really had.
Besides granting her an immunity to being intimidated, it granted her a 'high level of resistance' to outright mind control.
The greatest threat there was out there. Masters.
The Simurgh, Heartbreaker and more; More capes than Taylor knew about and feared even more than the PRT knew of and could deal with.
Any one of them could decide to mind control her, and she would lose all of her free will. As a tinker, she had even more fear for the Simurgh.
But this perk changed that, it wouldn't make her immune to mind control, but resistant enough that as long as she didn't do something stupid like try to give the Simurgh a hug, she likely could survive what they could pull off before she could get away, and then likely remove whatever they did through the use of Mental Awareness Refinement.
Level 2 was highly resistant, and more critically granted immunity to what the level 1 perk made her highly resistant to.
There was no doubt in her mind that level 3 was outright mind control immunity.
Pausing to consider the branches of her body mod she knew of, Taylor wondered if there was something similar to that granted immunity precogs, but unable to see most of the perks, she knew wasting charges on just that chance wasn't a good idea. After all the item to do such might be under her warehouse or even the forge.
She wanted to say it would be under body, but she couldn't say for certain enough to risk sending things that way until she knew better given the increased cost to do such. She just have to hope that the odds were in her favor.
0o0
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
0o0
Taylor found picking a good cape name for what she could do extremely difficult.
After all, what did she call herself given that she would grow to literal godly levels? With what she could do with just 3, no, 4 perks there was stuff she could do with the scanner even if it was extremely narrow, what would she look like with 10? 100? All 532?
The answer was simple enough, she should choose a name of a god for a cape name.
Which even she knew was the height of egoistic. No one humble would name themselves after a god except by accident.
But, as she tried to consider anything else, her Forge seemed to flicker in her mind, reminding her it was the forge of the gods and it would her to choose a name worthy of a god.
Which as far as she could tell, the only way to do such, was to take the name of a god from some mythology and claim it as her own.
Sighing, Taylor pulled up a list of god figures in mythology on the internet, which took her to the list maintained on PHO by the PRT as the first result, and giving that she decided it was a fair place to start her research.
At the very top was the extremely few that the Protectorate used, because you had to be the best of the best to be worthy to call yourself such. The PRT okaying such basically meant you were a Triumvirate tier cape in their eyes. For good, or for Bad.
The list of currently active villains with such godly names was longer but compared to those currently inactive or never claimed was rather short.
With supervillains willing to kill you for the reputation, claiming the name of a god, was inviting such. Likewise, to those that had named assigned by the PRT, they only did such for the big S-class threats.
There was plenty of options, but nothing that stood out.
Searching the list slowly names of gods of craftsmen came up, but for some reason her power didn't seem to like it, which was puzzling. She had expected her powers to be pushing for a name like Hephaestus or Vulcan.
But just indifference echoed there like every other god she could see loosely connected to forging and crafting.
Resolving to go over the entire list, wondering if it didn't care what name just so long as it was the name of a god. Taylor scanned each name regardless of what mythology it was from, and what they could do, trying to see if anything reacted like the way her power gave her a gentle push to use the name of a god or not.
At the sight of one name, a slight tweak, the same tweak that had been telling her to choose the name of a god, echo though her power, making it clear whoever gave this to her like this name she had just read, but at the same time they made it clear she didn't have to choose this one for her cape name.
Taylor stared at the name that whatever god had given her this power wanted her to use.
Selene, The Greek Goddess of the Moon.
Completely lost and puzzled by this, she looked up the details of the goddess in question, only to very quickly realize why this name had been chosen as she read the files on her.
Selene as the literal personification of the Moon, guarded the night. Terms for her were not just all seeing and wise, but as benevolent as well.
In a way it could be said that she was the one who guarded the night from evil.
Making sure she wasn't just the first name on a given a list of options for her to choose from, Taylor continued down them, finding that of them, only Selene gave the response and it was only the first time she looked at it. The push to use it, like to use a god's name was gone, still remembered, but no longer would it raise the point with her again.
Her powers had indicated which way it wanted her to go.
She had to decide if she would accept it or choose another name.
When she knew that if she wasn't interesting, she would stop earning charges.
Would it be more interesting for her to choose another name? Or would it be dangerous to do such?
She didn't know, she couldn't know.
But if she assumed the fact her powers wanted the name of a goddess for her… she might as well take it. She had no better ideas herself.
Mindful she would need to do some outreach later on PHO, New Wave did most of theirs on PHO, she checked to see if Selene was free for an account name.
To her very much surprise, it was free, so she registered the account, then turned her thoughts to how she should change her design of her armor to match her name.
Clearly, she wouldn't wear the dress that Selene was often shown in, but she could add something to her armor to hint to that, maybe a crescent moon on her chest with the silver gem that acted as the focus for her regenerative shield?
If she was making a dress she could do something extremely fancy, like maybe the image of Selene herself in a chariot across her body in some way, but her tailor's ability to perfect recreate an image in cloth didn't extend to armor, and she didn't want to make some sort of shirt to put over her armor as that would interfere with it ability to protect her.
Thoughts turned to design, wondering what would look best for her, as she felt her charges tick upwards to 1 out of the 2 charges she needed for the next level of Mental Resistance.
0o0
Saturday, January 28th, 2011
0o0
Unable to go on patrols until her redesigns on her armor was finished, it was very late Friday, or rather extremely early Saturday morning when Taylor made it out in costume.
Or rather Selene, as she adjusted her thoughts to think of herself as.
Before she departed, she doubled checked she had everything she needed. An enchanted bag of holding with any medical supplies she could guess that might be required, but even more critically, a cellphone she had bought at the store for just 20 dollars.
There was no service plan, it was prepaid only. It came with 10 minutes and then was good for emergency calls only. Since she only planned to call 911 with it, she hadn't bothered to grab the minute's card at all. The cheapest one was 20 dollars on its own, and she knew that 20 dollars for 100 minutes was not a good price at all.
Stepping out into the crisp winter air, Selene debated her path, then set forward on roughly the same route she took last time, deciding it was better to stick to a route she had already done once before until she got the hang of things.
With the aid of her blanket, she could get all the sleep she needed in just 2 hours, and she had more time than that before it was late enough to go out on patrol so that her dad didn't know what she was doing.
0o0
At first the patrol went much better than last time, as Selene didn't have to stop at every life sign in a building thinking they might be a robber and check it out. She just assumed those inside buildings were supposed to be there and moved on.
This allowed her to clear a lot more distance, but she came to an abrupt halt as something unusual appeared on her scanner.
In one of the office buildings, the topological scan was blank, showing a void in the middle of said building.
That made her stop to look in its direction puzzled; quite certain she would have noticed that last time.
Several things that could cause such came to mind, and had this been a bank, the PRT HQ or other such structure, she would have assumed it was just a secured room inside, and if this had been a new route, she would have assumed the same here.
Blocking her scanner did not take parahuman powers, just a know how of what it couldn't scan though, of which the quick answer was too much mass. There were much easier ways to block it then just enough mass, but that was the quick answer.
Then she noticed the area that was not on her sensor was shrinking.
Walls don't normally shrink on their own.
But jamming fields of some kind did.
Moving closer, Selene circled the building trying to get a look inside when she found a door that was wide open. A van parked nearby, also open, empty and abandoned with the engine still running.
Inside the building she could see the hallway was partly filled with darkness, which got thicker as it went further inside, fading away and letting her sensor see more as it did such.
It took a few glances back and forth before it hit her what was going on. She even read about this cape.
Grue, who created a cloud of darkness. This darkness couldn't be blown away and blocked cameras, and now that she had tested it, her sensor as well.
It faded over time, so if he was inside with some gang members, robbing this place… they likely had stopped in a room somewhere, and the parts fading out was where he had been before.
Her heartbeat picked up at that, as she felt her power earn the final charge she needed for the locked perk, and it became active.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.2.4 Mental Resistance III (100) + 100 Lock Tax. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Complete immunity to mind control with no more ranks to lock in.
Carefully balancing the odds, Selene decided that this was in her favor.
Grue was an adult man, and a big one at that given what she read about him.
Her armor made her four times stronger, and her power made her half peak human before the weeks of hard work and exercise.
She was at least twice peak human, and maybe closer to 3 times by now with all her hard work. Grue and a bunch of gang members robbing a building wouldn't be a threat to her without guns. Given that he wasn't known to use such, she should be fine there given the unwritten rules.
Debating about drawing her sword, she left it sheathed as she stood by the door waiting, not stupid enough to go inside, she wouldn't be able to see in the darkness.
She would grab them when they got out, catching them off guard when they walked out of the darkness themselves.
Just when she thought about calling the PRT now, the darkness started to expand outwards, and she knew that she wouldn't have time to do such.
So watching carefully, she saw the darkness start to spread down the hallway in front of her, before it came to a sudden halt, then started to spread in other direction.
It puzzled her for a bit until Selene realized that Grue must have been able to see though his darkness, he didn't leave a hole inside that she could see him like the curtain she was thinking about.
Since Grue could see though his darkness, he must have just seen her and stopped to wait.
"Surrender now villains." Selene called into the darkness, wondering what he would do. She didn't think it was a good idea to go rushing in, but she didn't think Grue was stupid enough to come walking out this way either.
There were other doors to the building.
Watching her sensor to see if he was doing that, she could see that the darkness was spreading to the rooms nearby, but not away from her. Likely because it was centered on him and thus filling in the spaces close to him now that he wasn't moving and thinking of his next move.
Suddenly, without warning, there was a flicker as a woman appeared on the sensor just long enough to be picked up, close enough to report she was a woman in good health.
Before Selene had even looked in her direction she was off the sensor and looking at the darkness in the window.
Waiting, well trying to think of anything that didn't require her to run into pure darkness, but not able to come up, she saw the darkness start to spread in the direction away from her. She waited a minute before she started to run to get in front of it, stopping outside the front door. It opened and stopped again. Then it surged past at a right angle, and she gave chase until she realized how fast that they were moving.
Her armor made her twice as fast as a human sprinting could be, nearly as fast as a car on the highway, and they were outpacing her.
How did Grue move so fast? Was he also a brute in secret?
But even if he was, that meant either he left his gang members behind, or he was alone.
Not giving to chase since an unknown brute changed a lot, Selene watched the building for any signs of them, but when the darkness faded and her sensors could see no one inside, she sighed and decided to leave.
As she did such, she felt another charge come on, and she focused on it.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.3.6 Corruption Resistance cost 100. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
A perk that was rather interesting to go with her immunity to mind control. She now had immunity to any corruption of her soul unless she allowed it and would be aware of any such actions that would cause that.
It was the sort of protection you never wanted to need, but if it was that or nothing, you wouldn't say no to for a very good reason.
00o
End of Chapter 02
0o0
Interlude 01: The Undersiders
0o0
It was supposed to be a nice and easy job, much like several such jobs the Undersiders had undertaken over the last 6 months together.
Things were normal at first, Grue blacked out the area they were in, leaving a gap large enough for them to see inside with flashlights. Pulling the darkness away from whatever they needed to interact in.
Tattletale unlocked doors, computers and whatever else was in their way. Bitch and Regent kept a look out for threats, but otherwise like Grue was more there to help carry things and not do any fighting. Since all this time was data off the computer, they gathered in the room and waited as Tattletale collected such. All they would be walking out with when this was over was a flash drive with the information their boss wanted and nothing else.
Nothing had gone wrong with that, and it was only on the way out that suddenly the plan fell off the rails.
"Stop!" Grue called out as they almost reached the door when he saw a what clearly to his eyes was a new cape standing outside of it in power armor, a sheath sword on her hip, and some sort of device in her hands pointed down the hallway at them.
"Why?" Regent asked.
"There a cape outside, new one."
"There is?" Tattletale noted as she looked in the direction of the door. "I can't get anything under your power, what he is doing?"
"I think it a she given the shape and markings on her power armor." Grue replied. "Just standing there pointing something at the doorway, too far for me to see what other than it in her hand. She got a sword as well, but it sheathed right now."
"Just one, I can take her." Bitch noted as she indicated to her dogs.
"Boss is paying extra to keep this quiet." Tattletale reminded Bitch. The girl glared at her but didn't say anything on that. "I peek out a side room, yell if she moves."
With that Tattletale headed to the room next to them, Grue carefully extending his shadows around her to coat the room she entered before she went in then leaving a void in the middle for her to move around in with her flashlight.
Grue could tell when Tattletale peeked out because the woman in armor outside immediately turned in her direction and kept looking at her.
"Tattletale-"
"I saw it, already back inside." Tattletale shouted from the room, and made her way over quickly, still yelling, so they could be heard as she ran then walked to rejoin them. "Tinker, in power armor like you guessed. The item in her hand is a sensor. She noticed us here on it due to the shielding effect of your darkness, but she can't locate us exactly under your darkness. Only that your Darkness is here. I didn't get a long enough look at her to tell if she called the white hats or not, but I did get enough to see that just the tip of her stuff, her armor gives her a large brute rating on its own. I have to research her later to tell you more, but we should be assuming Armsmaster in ability, not L33t until I can get more on her."
"Well shit." Regent observed.
"It not that bad yet, her sensor can't locate where we are in Grue's darkness. We go out the front and run, and we get out of range. No more than half a mile, likely a quarter at most. Anything less than that, and she wouldn't have noticed us unless she was already on her way here. Anything more and she would have shown up sooner."
"So we turn tail and run?" Bitch asked.
"Yes, we do." Grue told her firmly.
"We should prepare the dogs anyway before we run, in case she tries to follow us in. Right now she's trying to study your effect Grue, well I can't get a longer read without her noticing, she's not going to wait forever."
0o0
Back at their base, Lisa relaxed. Despite the fact the cape had tried to give chase at first, they got away, and they had stayed under Grue's darkness for a good distance before she checked and confirmed that they were not being followed.
A successful mission, even if there was an unexpected complication.
She would need to turn the data over in person tomorrow, but she had to let Coil know now, so he could drop his safety timeline and accept the success here.
Delaying that, would be extremely unpleasant for her. She might have managed avoiding all the timeline when he punished her for making him keep up a safety timeline past what conditions he told her, but she hadn't avoided knowing what she had only barely escaped out on experiencing firsthand all those times, with the clear message was that if she went too far, it wouldn't be the alternate her that experienced it, but herself first hand.
He always could choose which he wanted to keep after he got done with her in both after all.
Lisa pulled out her phone and dialed it up, knowing he was ready for her to do such. He wouldn't let her call off the safety timeline if he wasn't ready to do such the instant she called.
It defeated the entire purpose of it to do otherwise.
"Hello Lisa."
"Hey Boss. Mission was a success with only a minor deviation to note."
"Oh?"
"A new cape showed up. Not one I have seen before, a tinker with decent power armor and some sort of sensor that picked up Grue's darkness and drew her interest to our crime. Good enough of a sensor that she focused on me as soon as I looked at her myself, so I didn't get much of a look just yet. We got out with the data and other than that nothing else happened."
"Describe her."
Lisa rattled off what she got of the very brief look at the cape, mixed with what Brian had shared with her from what he could see in the hallway, which wasn't that much, then added in. "I am going to be looking for various security footage to see if I can get a better picture of her. She might have been planning to hit the same place we did. Having a tinker would be useful for the Undersiders."
"I agree. Look into it and let me know if you need any safety around her." Coil confirmed.
Lisa swallowed as she understood what he meant there. If she asked for that, either she better bring something good, or she would be punished.
How, Lisa really didn't want to know more than she had already been forced to figure out by Coil already as punishments for her misbehavior, one step removed from experiencing it personally. But that was already bad enough, and she knew it was only on his grace that he hadn't already had her keep the very personal and very painful experiences of one of her sessions under him.
As bad as asking for one that she didn't really need would be for her, it would be even worse for her if he felt like she should have asked for one and didn't.
Coil would decide if it was a good enough request or not and choosing to never ask for fear of making a bad request would just get her a worse punishment than if it had been a bad request in his eyes. One that he promised she wouldn't lose to an alternate timeline, to make sure she never tried such again. So long as she kept up a string of reasonable requests for a safe timeline, even if he never used them, she would be fine.
She walked a very narrow tightrope, and too much either way would see her in pain one way or another.
"I would like a basic profile on her by the end of next week. Name, leanings, what gear she made so far." Coil finished, and Lisa nodded, the time frame was normal for a new cape. He hadn't heard of her yet and without any concerns that she might interfere, he rather she spent more time refining what she handed over rather than up the minute stuff that they both knew would have errors until she worked them out of it.
Any cape that wasn't still around in a week, wasn't someone they could have recruited or used anyway.
"You will have it boss." She agreed. Lisa couldn't do anything else.
0o0
"What the Fuck?" Lisa outright screamed the next day as wasn't sure if she should trust what her power was telling her about this new cape's gear with how freely it was telling her things.
Normally she could only get the tiniest hints of what something would do until it was used. Even telling something was tinker tech was hard unless she noticed it acting differently in some way.
She had been expecting many long hours of looking over every recording of this new cape she could find by breaking into various systems around the city to get the barest ideas of what it could do.
But on the very first one, her power decided that she wasn't going to need to do that. As soon as she saw the cape on a security camera, rather than hints that her armor was power arm, it started listing out details like she had spent months studying it in detail. Information that she couldn't possibly draw on from what she knew. Information she wasn't sure if all of Watchdog at the PRT had spent a week with her gear, with outright willing endbringers to help test things and likely Scion they couldn't get this much.
How did you prove if thrown out of reality would return within 2 days anyway? Was there some hole in reality she needed to watch out for that people tested such a thing on?
Details that went from worrying to puzzlement to outright confusion and disbelief that couldn't possibly be true.
And every time she tried to think that this was some sort of anti-thinker gear that the cape might used to trick her, her power kept going at her, no it was true. All of this was true.
Assuming she treated her power as not wrong and lying to start with. Some items were concerning to her, such as the fact that the sword was sharp enough to cut bitch's dog like they were made of water was worrying, and would have caused Lisa to think this new cape was in clear need of a lesson in the underwritten rules.
Which her power had helpfully informed her she had gotten the first night as well. She had ZERO data to build this conclusion on. It should have been so blindly inaccurate that it should have been worthless. But she knew who had told her and more or less what they had said.
The armor having a similar feature to Glory Girl's shield, more than enough to withstand a hit from Behemoth, should have required her either watch said cape get hit by such, or something near that. Not just its interactions from standing outside around a hospital.
The only thing she was missing was the fact that there was no known charge time yet, such a thing should have come up way sooner than all the rest.
And then she moved into the insane levels. Which besides her power either deciding to suddenly just give her all the answers with no effort, was her power reporting that said her gear was self-regenerating to the point that even if the Simurgh wanted to destroy or even alter them, she couldn't, anymore she could destroy the concept of gravity. Sure she could bend it for a while, but unless she kept bending it the very universe would snap back to how it had been before.
It would take outright destruction of reality itself to destroy them as well.
How did her power even know that? How could she draw such a conclusion from what she saw?
The only sane answer had her power kept hitting back with the same thing. It not some anti-thinker device. Her gear really is that good.
Lisa slapped her hand over her face, as she tried to calm down and think, not wanting to have her power continue to feed her information that it couldn't know. Trying very hard to not think about the fact that any thoughts it was fake was meet with increasingly insistent it not.
Either this cape could alter the fundamental laws of reality to the point that Endbringers would basically be as harmless as a kitten, given she could apparently make things that became universal constants.
Or…
Lisa had to stop at the or part as her power reminded her this cape could do that.
A hypothetical cape that wasn't the one she was looking at could alter the fundamental rules of reality, or they had designed and deployed some anti-thinker device.
Lisa blinked at the feeling of amusement that came from her power. It never had been like that before.
She tried to turn her power on herself then suddenly tried to recall where she was as something was cut.
Blinking she recalled her last thoughts.
A hypothetical cape that wasn't the one she was looking at could alter the fundamental rules of reality, or they had designed and deployed some anti-thinker device.
Answer A was basically impossible, so clearly answer B.
This should have been enough to call Coil now, since something was up with her ability to read this girl… but she didn't want to.
Telling this to Coil now, would mean doing nothing but research her under his gaze. But if she kept looking for how she did she, Lisa could find the device in question that was distracting her and work around it.
Somehow.
There is no way this was all correct, and she would find out the truth. If this cape thought she could trick her with some tinker tech device, she had another thing coming.
0o0
Unknown to Taylor, a new recording she could watch appeared at her Kiosk
0o0
End of Interlude 01
0o0
Chapter 2 perks earned
2.4.1 Windows
3.1.5 Scanner (Iji)
1.4.3 Strategic Mastery II
3.6.6 Profession: Tailoring (Zen Master) (World of Warcraft)
1.2.4 Mental Resistance II
1.2.4 Mental Resistance III
1.3.6 Corruption Resistance
0o0
Chapter 02: Expansion
0o0
On the way home, Taylor was busy designing her armor in her head as she weighed what options she would use. A tiny part of her was unhappy that it was limited to still medieval level technology, as she couldn't make armor that could let her fly or do anything unique in that regard.
With the designs she could create from Infinitely Customizable, she could do some rather impressive things, but that required nanotechnology.
That didn't mean her armor would be completely normal. Not sure what to think about the fact that it ran on magic rather than nanotechnology too much, she focused more on what it would be and less on how it would get there, even if she couldn't help but use the magical terms it wanted her to put it under.
It would be enchanted armor that would make her anywhere from slightly stronger to at least as strong as Armsmaster in his own armor, depending on which options she selected, with the latter being the most time-consuming to make.
Taylor first real debate with herself over her future gear was over the base material that she would use in the end. She could create all of her equipment 'shaped' as her power called it, or she could make it out of Puresteel.
Making her gear shaped was a lot faster when it came to construction time. Fast enough she could get a basic set done and head out on patrols this evening. Whereas if she used Puresteel it would be closer to month, 2 weeks if she managed to use every waking movement to build it to the point there was no way her father would miss what she was doing.
There were other factors as well, although the most clear one didn't apply to her so long as she built her armor in her workshop.
She didn't need to build it there, but anything she did would auto-repair such outright vaporization would be undone in 48 hours and lesser damage would heal in a relative fraction of that time.
Eliminating one of the main purposes of shaped equipment, because although it wasn't biological in nature, at least the stuff she both had access to and was willing to even consider that was there were some plans that were purely biological she very quickly ignored; It would still self-heal slowly so long as the damage wasn't too extreme.
Enough damage, and it would be destroyed and had to be rebuilt completely.
Made outside her workshop that was. When made inside her workshop, this was completely moot point, unless she enchanted a shaped material to self-repair faster, meaning she couldn't use anything else to make it more useful for it very purpose of existing; The very nature of making it in her workshop would already repair it faster and far more completely than a shaped material could ever repair itself.
Two factors warred in her head, First was time, and the second was quality of the end gear.
Puresteel was orders of magnitude stronger. It couldn't be made to self-repair as its nature was very different from shaped gear. But because of this different nature, it could hold much stronger enchantments, and to layer these in, took a lot longer time. And that was ignoring the fact that the nature of being made in her workshop would cause it to self-repair anyway, so the lack of self-repair was a moot point.
It only took a few seconds to make up her mind. It was better to make her armor stronger, then to worry about how quickly she made it. No one knew she had powers yet, so there was no danger to making the best she could first. She set the timeline for when she went out on patrol, she didn't need to buy anything but time to make her armor.
Her random salvaging for parts had been the only thing she did that could have linked her to be a tinker, and she was careful enough to not be noticed.
Taylor had considered her plans for the next few weeks set, until she felt her power warning her. Causing her to come to a stop as she focused on the message she was getting, which had surprised her given the contents of such and the lack of the same on other days so far.
Her power was warning her that it wouldn't give her charges for the timeframe that she was building her armor if that was what she wanted to do. It wasn't interesting to it watch her smelt Puresteel and hammer it into an armor and weapon in the forge.
If she wanted to keep making charges well, she was working on that, she would have to do something else in that timeframe.
Which was a very strong suggestion to use the weaker material, so she could get out faster.
On careful consideration, Taylor decided that with the perks she already owned, even if she had little idea of that the rest were; The dangers of going out in less than her best when it came to armor, wasn't worth the extra charges she would get by going out faster.
She had to be alive to use them after all.
At the thought of the perks she had, her thoughts turned to Infinitely Customizable as she recalled it worked on weapons and tools and was curious if she could combine them to upgrade her armor even more while, she was making it.
With both perks at the forefront of her mind, Taylor was stunned when she felt the two blend and reach out, focusing on the other and something created by both entered her mind.
Rather than the nanotechnology based 'power nodes' that Infinitely Customizable was supposed to use, and she had been fighting to get it to work without those, the two working together would let her craft 'power gems' that would act the same as Power Node could on anything under the domain of Geneforge crafting.
Though the use of this, she could take what was already some impressive enchantments on her gear to the next level. Enough to make shaped gear as good as Puresteel, and items made of Puresteel beyond anything that was possible by that perk alone.
It still wasn't enough to make armor that could let her fly, and her armor and weapon would be limited to 4 upgrade categories at the most with a bonus item 'perk' that well she could select, did have to be related to its function in the item in question and required that all upgrade categories were completely filled before it would take effect.
A capstone for her gear basically.
*Power Buy Attempt 2.4.1 Windows (50). Bought. Banked 50 points. *
Reroll since last perk was fully bought/ bought to some level of ranking and points > 0
*Power Buy Attempt 2.2.3 Realistic Ground Cover (100). Not Bought. Banked 50 points. *
Taylor paused in her steps home as her power surged and went out for new perk, or rather perks, as it tried for a second one when it got the first one but failed to get such. Both under her warehouse, and as soon as she saw what they were she let out a sigh, only confirming in her mind that she had made the right choice in locking in her prior selection even with the cost increase.
Her powers clearly had some nice perks, but it also had some rather useless ones. The useless ones were cheaper, so they wouldn't hurt as much. But given what she got out of her armor, she only confirmed that the charges she had lost as a tax were not wasted, when she could have ended up spending those charges on this like this.
Although her perks were randomly selected, these two had a theme with each other of making her warehouse look nice. The one it did pick up let her place windows that showed the outside world, but not in a way that would let her spy on anything.
The best she could do was get a skyline of Brockton bay, and unless something major was happening like an Endbringer attack, or someone decided to level half of the city, she wouldn't be able to tell what was going on there. It was just a nice view, nothing more.
The perk she didn't get, would have it let her change the ground in her warehouse to something else. Not worthy to lock in, so she left it alone.
The windows might have some use, likely but just letting her see if it was still light out well she was working, so it wasn't entirely useless to her.
Just not useful enough to mean anything in terms of a fight or information gathering, so she returned her thoughts returned to crafting her armor.
She was limited to four boosted categories on her armor with Infinitely Customizable, but she could define what those were so long as they fit the theme of the item in question. Theme was rather broad as well. Besides protecting armor could be upgraded to boost her physical abilities rather than just its protective nature.
Taylor knew she wanted protection so that selection was locked in without question. Her armor was supposed to protect her after all and every bit she could add on would be more than worth it cost in gold. Boosting strength made sense as well. It meant she could hit harder or move heavy things as needed. In that same token, agility, so she could move around easy and quietly in it was a good third one to select.
The fourth was harder. She could add in fire resistance and with a full upgrade tree on it, it would make her close to very resistant to fire, she would need to consider actions like stepping into a steel forge before it could hurt her, or she could add in healing on herself well she was wearing it. That would take about an hour to fully heal her and wouldn't undo maiming injuries, but anything she could recover from naturally would be healed in an hour, rather than even the days she still needed with her healing ability in the worst cases.
Taylor couldn't make her armor more resistant to bullets, that was covered under general resistance.
There were clear pros and cons to both, since running into Lung was a runaway as fast as she could regardless of how much fire resistance she had. Furthermore her own healing perk wasn't going to be fast enough to noticed in combat, where a healing enchantment could be.
But doing so would mean she wouldn't be able to resist being hurt in the first place.
She was better off making clothes that did that and wearing them afterwards to heal up if her own healing ability wasn't good enough to handle how she got hurt after a fight.
Or just wear them under her armor and get both effects? Could she even do that?
Taylor carefully considered what her perks were telling her as she tried to see if she could do that, and to her surprise realized that she could layer them like that. But with restrictions.
Infinitely Customizable did assume that she wants some sort of under layer that she placed armor on over such, and they could be upgraded separately. However, in order for the upgrades to affect her, she had to lose a slot on each to link them up, as those upgrades would be to connect the gear together. Meaning rather than 8 slots between the two, she had six. Well a third layer could get her to 8, if she did such, things got a lot more complicated as she either needed to connect all of them, bringing her down to six again defeating the point of a third layer outside of gaining the option of a third perk for her gear, or take some very careful layering with restrictions as to not have her gear destroy itself from the unconnected items effecting her.
It was possible, but would require a lot of careful design and testing that her powers couldn't just let her bypass. Where if she used 2 layers, she could just treat it the same way as 1 and not need to do any testing.
Redesigning her gear with this in mind, and keeping it to 2 layers for now as it was far simpler, she added an under layer of clothes that after some though in her head, was designed for when she was in armor, and she would make a second set of clothes for when she was out, given she couldn't make a single set of clothes that did both with everything she wanted.
For her clothes in gear, she settled on healing, fire resistance and what amounted to a life support system giving her a limited oxygen supply which was only a few minutes worth, but would autofill as soon as she was in any breathable air.
The last one puzzled her a bit, since Infinitely Customizable was letting her do that, and she wasn't quite sure how it had pulled that out of Geneforge when mixed, since nothing in Geneforge would let her do the same.
For the perk on her underclothes, she added in an auto-triggered stabilize on herself, so if she somehow got hurt bad enough to be bleeding out, it would stop that. Not something she ever wanted to do, but it was the best of her options for perks on that given that it was going to have another layer of gear on top, which restricted what she could place on it.
For the armor proper, she put protection, strength and agility boosting. Due to the link up slot on both the effects of each gear would combine well she was wearing both, making her armor as fire resistant as she would be.
For the perk that her armor would gain when all of its upgrade trees were full, Taylor decided the best one was a perk that let her armor absorb one hit perfectly, but then need a minute to recharge before it could do that again. She could only make it faster if she did not let it block everything that it hit it. And as far as she was concerned, the ability to take an unexpected sniper round to the face was a lot better than a faster shield that wouldn't be able to stop said sniper round as when she could get it to recharge fast enough that people wouldn't have a gap they could exploit well her shield was down, it only made her armor slightly more defensive.
She could think of other things that might be useful, but that seemed like the best option, although she couldn't make it faster, it would be good for a surprise attack.
Lastly, her clothes out of costume, which would have to be shaped because she couldn't make Puresteel look like cloth, would gain protection, strength, agility and fire resistance, on which she put the same one shot protection from any attack that was on her armor.
All five of those would out of her as a cape should something happen when she was out and about, but Taylor put not dying as a valid reason to out herself as a cape if it came down to it.
She would say who she was on public news if that meant never dying in a heartbeat.
The one-shot protection did take something that could break or cause her notable harm. Tripping wouldn't be enough. Sophia hitting her unless it would break her nose wouldn't be enough.
Well that could be an issue if Sophia decided to give her a beating in public, one that was bad enough to break bones, Taylor was not going to take a beating just to stay masked.
New wave was public, and they did fine as heroes after all.
0o0
As Taylor worked on crafting the first upgrade gem to apply to her now shaped clothes that she had made. Starting with the clothes she would wear around town from now on well she was out of costume first, she looked at the piles of gems that were her options to work with, not for the first time wishing she could just take a gem from the pile and sell it.
Any money problems would just disappear if she could.
But she couldn't, and not just because she didn't have a good way to explain where she got it from.
The powers behind her warehouse gave her infinite amount of raw basic materials for crafting only. She could stretch it if she decided to build something outside of her workshop to take something outside, which was how she could build a building outside without needing to figure out how to get out the door afterwards, and still have it effected by her powers, granting it fiat backing to always exist as she had created it and to return to such should anything damage it.
But only if she was intending to use it to build something. Anything from her raw supplies removed from the room for any purpose other than crafting would cause them to vaporize within seconds of leaving. If she changed her mind afterwards it would do the same.
It was entirely based on what she intended to do with such, so if she didn't intend to use it to build something, it would go poof.
She had already tested and confirmed such with the gold bars. If she wanted to take anything to sell out, she had to make it into something first. If she suddenly needed to sell something gold coins wouldn't be hard to make, just melt gold and pour into molds. They wouldn't look good, but they would be real coins and count enough for her to remove them afterwards.
The only way to sell something out of her workshop was to make something to sell first.
Refocusing her attention on her work, her thoughts turned to the fact her father would be home soon, and what she might do when he got home.
It was sort of painful to think about, but she yearned for a connection to her father that she hadn't felt since her mother died.
But she had no idea how she would do such. Her father had been so distant since her mother died, and even though she was better now, thanks not in small part to her powers, she had no idea how to move them to little more than strangers in the same house, to a family again.
Every meal since she got her powers had been silence that weighed on her heart, uncertain of what to say or do or even talk about to bridge the gap between them.
Taylor didn't think it was lost forever, but she felt like she was looking for a path while she lost in the woods, with no idea where to start looking for answers, and wandering blindly would only take her further from answers.
It didn't help that she couldn't see what to talk about during those quiet meals. Telling him that she had powers had been considered, and Taylor did want to tell her dad she had them.
But was stopped by concerns of what that might lead to.
As much as she wanted to deny it, she was still a child. Her father was her guardian, and if he decided they were moving to Germany, all she could do about it was start learning her German for when they got there.
Which was why Taylor was afraid of what might happen if she told him she had powers.
She wanted to believe that he would respect her desires and when she said she didn't want to join the wards until she knew they were good people; That she would rather wait until she was old enough to join the protectorate, if they were not, and he would accept that and that would be it.
But there was the sliver of a chance he wouldn't accept that, and in what really hurt her to think about because she could understand why he would do it, her father could realize how poor of a father he had been these last few years and just put her into the wards.
And like school, she would have no say about it. He was her guardian and the PRT made it very clear on the advertisements for the wards.
Are you a child that has superpower and wish to make the world a better place with your powers? Ask your parents to enroll you in the wards today.
Ask your parents, not, talk to us about joining.
In the end, she was a minor, and as much as she realized it had to be missing something because she couldn't see anything good happening if you forced a child with super powers in the wards against their wishes, the fact that it was stupid didn't mean it wasn't the law.
A sliver of a chance, no matter how small, was too much before she knew the state of the wards. If she was ready to sign up, she would tell him without any hesitation.
But until then, it was not a topic they could talk about.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.1.5 Scanner (Iji) (200). Not Bought. Banked 150 points. *
Taylor was glad for the distraction as her power tried, although failed to acquire a perk for her. Her thoughts going onto this new perk to study it.
Like with the tags Dead Space and Geneforge before there was a new tag on the end that she didn't get the context of yet.
What Dead Space had to do with upgrades was mysteries to her.
At least with Geneforge she could vaguely see how, as she could make some biological gear if she had the right parts, however most of her gear was anything but biological, so unless you squinted and said shaped gear was biological because it could self-repair, even though it had nothing biological to do with it, it was a poor tag given what it contained.
Iji was even worse than the other tags she had seen before, because she had no idea if that meant anything. Was it a name? Was it a Japanese or Chinese word?
Turning her thoughts to the perk itself, figuring that answer to those tags would only become clear in time, she became aware that this item was a scanner of some sort, not just by it rather clear name but by what it could do.
It could scan for lifeforms in an area around her. That wasn't all it could do, there was more to it than that, but she couldn't get more that out of the perk as it was right now.
Since it was only double the missing charge cost, and she was missing exactly half a charge, meaning one charge to secure this, for a life signs detector of some kind, Taylor had no issue locking it in at that.
Then her thoughts turned back to what else she could talk about with her father.
Powers were out, School was quite clearly out as well, she wasn't returning until February 1st to give the police time to finish their investigation and arrest those reasonable.
At that thought, Taylor tried to recall what she had said to them, unable to remember that week well enough to remember, but she figured she must have told them who had done so.
Or had she? Her dad hadn't said anything about Uncle Alan and Emma.
Taylor paused in her work as she realized that she had thought of Alan as her uncle again, it had been years since she did that, ever since Emma betrayed her.
Why did she even do that, did her power do that?
A bit of internal pondering gave her the answer. It was extremely indirectly. Her honorary uncle hadn't ever hurt her, that was all Emma. She stopped thinking of him as her uncle because of Emma. But when her issues were cleared up when her powers made her a normal adjusted person, she stopped assuming he was responsible for what Emma was doing to her.
Which was why she considered him Uncle again. Aunties Zoe and Anne as well. The links Emma had torn down to her family had been reformed as they had never hurt her.
It had all been Emma.
And she had never even noticed her thoughts around them had changed until now.
Shaking her head, knowing that there was little chance of reconnecting with the rest the family that had been as close as if they were her real aunts and uncles, with Emma as her sister, her thoughts went back to what to talk to her dad about.
School was out. Emma was out. What happened to her was most certainly out.
Taylor couldn't think of anything else to talk to him, nor what else she could do. Touch him to show she cared? He was more likely to freak by the sudden contact from her. A hug would be even worse.
There were no good options, only a list of bad ones, and many uncertain ones that she had no idea where to start.
Turning her thoughts to something she did know how to do, she settled into start forging the armor that would make her a hero.
0o0
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
0o0
Standing before the mirror that her workshop provided her, Taylor stood completely clad in head to toe in her brand-new armor, looking it over and considering if she had to change anything or if it was finally done after a long 3 weeks.
Her very first thought as she looked at it, was that she couldn't believe she had made this gear.
Even she could see it wasn't a masterpiece to anyone with real skill, but it clearly required at least some skill in the craft, far more than an apprentice would have, but nowhere near that of a master. Somewhere in-between the two.
The armor itself was almost plain with how little it had on it. The vast bulk of it was the silver of Puresteel, the only designs on such were the lines made of gold required to allowed her power gems to boost the armor's already impressive enchantments from her power, to the levels that made it outright power armor.
The general shape of the armor was that of a woman. Although when Taylor had started her designs in her head, her power had corrected and removed the boob plate she was expecting to need in a woman's armor. Making her understand as it corrected her design in that factor that wasn't a good idea for protective armor at all.
It didn't mean this metal armor didn't make her look like a man. Thanks to the influences of Infinitely Customizable, it had been able to better shape it to her body, then she could have done with Geneforge on it own.
It wasn't as far as the outright nanotechnology it expected and with that, she could have made her armor look like street clothes, without losing any protection.
But it still had been able to shape it better to her body, meaning that even without the boob plate, there was enough signs from added material and the need to fit her body for full range of motion that no one would mistake her for anything other than a woman in this armor.
To the point that looking at it, even though her hair was hidden in her helmet, she felt far more like a woman than she ever had before. Which she found increasingly weird the more she thought about that given her armor was anything but 'soft or curvy'.
It looked rather intimating to her eyes.
Well very plain, the gold lines that existed solely for the purposes of boosting it abilities, gave the hint that this wasn't just armor and there was something more to it, the gem placed around it as required to boost her properly only reinforced this image.
The biggest being the gem over the center of her chest that was the source of the 'perk' for this armor. It had been one thing that she had tried and failed to move. For a one hit shield, she needed it in the center of the biggest part of the armor.
Even to her unskilled eyes it screamed, attack me here, it is my weak point.
But it wouldn't work if she moved it elsewhere. Even on her shaped clothes she had to do that, but in that case she had made it look like a very poor, but still simple design that made it look more like a glass bead as an eye on the picture of a cat, and less a gem that was the source of her power.
So she was a teenager girl with a bad graphic of a cat on her sweater, no one even gave her a second glance with that.
As much as she tried, she couldn't figure out how to hide it on the armor with her limited skills in doing such right now, her attempts to do such only seemed to draw even more attention to it, not less.
Taylor gaze moved to her hands as she bent and twisted them, shocked at how free her movement in the armor was. This had been one of the areas that Infinitely Customizable managed to help without needing the nanotechnology it expected the most. For some reason it seemed to really like laying metal plates over her fingers in a way that didn't limit their ability to interact with the world, far more than she could have done from Geneforge alone.
Her solid metal gloves felt like they were latex medical gloves with how much she could feel and move them. There clearly was something over her hands, but it didn't feel like sheets of metal unless she looked at it.
At that thought, an impulse had her try to order a command that failed because the system didn't exist yet.
This cause her to laugh out loud as she thought of the retractable helmet her power wanted her to build, it would have been so cool if she had it, but it required such a deep level of nanotechnology that she likely have to beg it off Dragon to get access to, at least until she got the perks that let her make it herself.
Shaking her head, Taylor hand went to the weapon she had made, drawing a long sword and holding it up to the light.
Five gems shown on the blade itself, four of them making the weapon shaper beyond anything she could do without nanotechnology, but it was the fifth one that she intended to make far more use.
It had required a completed tree on an item before she could install it, she couldn't just add a perk to something without at least one customization tree, and the more the trees the stronger the perk could be.
With a thought, the sword lit up on fire.
Taylor had no training with her sword, nor could she figure out how to grant herself training or even direct it by just upgrades.
So she had no intention to ever swing it at a person, at least not until her training in it use let her get somewhere with it first.
It was all for intimidation. If she had to fight, she wouldn't use the sword at all. But she had a feeling a knight with a flaming sword would scare off anyone she wouldn't be running from herself when she recognized them.
Looking in a mirror, she nodded slowly, surprised at how well the metal mask carried her features, even that she didn't even have eye holes open. They were twin shards of pure crystal that due to the rest of the enchantment of the armor shouldn't break any easier than the steel.
It was exactly what she wanted out of this design.
Putting the sword out, she placed it clumsily into its sheath, then started to walk around, feeling how light she was in the armor. She was wearing some 200 pounds of Puresteel, but felt like she was about to take off into the air with each step.
The armor before upgrades doubled her strength and agility. The upgrades doubled those again. She could lift her suit five time over while she was inside it.
The fire resistance she had already tested carefully around a flame, and by the time she was done with the testing she was willing to risk; she had held her hand in the flame and didn't even feel her armor warm up. It would take fire far hotter than her forge could make to harm her so long as she wore it.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.1.5 Scanner (Iji) (200) + 50 Lock in Tax. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
As if it was a reward for finally finishing her armor, Taylor felt her power acquire the scanner she had been promised with that, losing the half of a charge she had laying around as tax for the lock in, and her thoughts turned away from her armor as she made her way over to the device that had appeared in the storage section of her warehouse, no longer needing the mirror of the workshop to evaluate if she needed to make any final changes to her armor.
Well she could see stuff she wanted different; she knew it was beyond her skills to do such right now.
As such, her armor was done, and now she had the one tool that would help her find crime when she went out on a patrol.
Picking up the Scanner, Taylor looked it over knowing not only how it would work, but also the fact that it was backed like items from her workshop to always exist, much like her key.
Like her key, if it was lost or stolen, it would return to her. Only in the warehouse rather than onto her person.
Unlike her key, this took 24 hours to do, where they key would do such in a few minutes.
Much like items made in her workshop, it would self-repair. Only it was faster, taking only 24 hours to fully repair, rather than 48.
As much as she might wish it, items made in her workshop couldn't automatically return to her if lost or stolen, she has to find them the hard way if they were lost. Returning to her if they were lost only applied to stuff her powers gave her, not what she constructed with them.
The only exception was if they were literally tossed out reality. Items cast forth from reality would regenerate and reappear in her warehouse 48 hours later. Taylor knew this, she hoped that she never could find such, even though she had a feeling when her power included instructions on exactly what happened if she were to lose her stuff outside of reality itself.
With the perk backing her, she found it as easy to use the scanner as if she had been born with it in her hand. Knowing every feature, every function every ability as if she herself had designed and built this herself
If she had the right parts, she could have built a copy in her sleep, she could have programmed it the same way.
The perk gave her 'blueprints' for all the parts that made it up her scanner, but that didn't tell her how to turn raw materials into those parts in questions, nor what tools she would need to build them. Only what they would look like when done and what their finished state was made of.
This knowledge was locked to make exactly that, no more, no less. It was enough for her to draw hints with the aid of Infinitely Customizable to build this scanner into the helmet of her armor, provided she had the parts and with the proper nanotechnology that perk expected she had that was.
There was only so much it could do without that.
So in lacking those, it would take research to do anytime soon, but it was research she was more than willing to spend the time on, since it had a clear gain for her, even if there was a chance it would become worthless by a perk she gained before she figured it out.
Given the speeds of perks when she was doing something interesting, she was quite sure that would solve the issue before she could figure out a design herself, but at least it gave her something to work on until then.
Although the perk had hinted this was a life signs detector and it in fact was one, it turned out that the main function of the scanner wasn't to locate people. It was to scan items, by placing it within about a meter and moving the scanner around an item.
In doing such, she got details of the item in question that wouldn't just give her the overall state of it, but the blueprints she needed to make it, and the raw materials used to make each part of said blueprints.
It wouldn't tell her how they were shaped in that way, not if the parts used were the best, but it would give a very big starting point to duplicate whatever she scanned, since she knew everything in the final product and exactly how it was put together.
The life signs detector was a side effect of this ability, rather than it main purpose, allowing it to tell if there was anyone within 100 meters of it, as well as basic topography of the area within the same, and if they were in 10 meters she could tell more about them such as how healthy they were, if they were awake or asleep and things along that vein.
Bring it to within a meter of a person and scanned them like an item, and she would she get detailed medical information on them down to their very DNA, although Taylor could tell she had no idea how to resolve that to anything useful without either waiting for a perk that gave her medical knowledge or a lot of self-study, since her scanner didn't tell her what was wrong, only what it currently was. It would be up to her to figure out dangerous or not, although some basic things would be clear to her even without specialized training.
A doctor would likely get more use out of this on people.
Dragon would likely pay good money for this given what it could do if she got her hands-on tinker tech. A perfect blueprint of whatever tinker tech it scanned, and list of materials used to make it had to be useful to her.
Any tinker for that matter.
Taylor turned the scanner on herself to scan the armor she was in curious of what it would show her.
If she pointed this at herself rather than her armor, she could scan herself down to her DNA. But she had no idea what it would show her around tinker tech like her armor.
The result were quick. And what she found in the results floored her.
She was expecting a blueprint of her armor, the materials it was made of and a listing of the gems she used to upgrade it without any indication how to make them, much like how it would tell her this blueprint used standardized part x, without telling her how to make that.
It did have those, but it wasn't where it ended in the details.
On the gems she had taken, shaped and enchanted with her powers to act as 'power gems', fine details that shouldn't exist were layered inside, details that looked like some sort of circuit board made of runes rather than the shapes she was expecting on such. Somehow both incomprehensible to her, but at the same time when she looked at the pattern she knew exactly what it did.
In the case of the gems, it made them count as a power source to fuel the upgrade. The real source of the upgrade was on the armor itself, hidden in the golden line. Looking at the scan results she could see tiny shapes in what she thought was just straight lines of gold as she laid them in place, now zoomed in to show that it was made of a single thin line with runes on either side connected by other thin lines, the details of which was so fine that to her naked eye it looked like just a single thick line of gold. The nature of these runes and their connecting lines puzzling and hinting to a deeper layer of reality than she knew existed.
But even though the meaning of just one was beyond her, the lines sung to her mind of the ability controlled by that line in question, which upgrade path it allowed her gear to function with.
It made Taylor's head hurt the more she looked at it, since it was like being unable to read the words of a story, but looking at text you had no idea what said, you knew the story, but couldn't point to any part of it and say what it did.
Only what the story in the end was about.
This, more than anything was proof she was a tinker. She had managed to etch nanoscopic effects on her armor and gems with medieval tools. The very nature of her power expressed on the world somehow, by of a detail far beyond that of her scanner's ability to tell her about, only to show her was there before it gave up unable to explain more.
Far beyond her ability to even begin to guess what they all meant.
She could tell from just the glances she saw, these patterns on her armor would be someone's life work to just understand, and she held no chance of doing such without more perks aiding her.
It made her feel so small, as she got a glance of something so tiny, and yet fundamental to the universe, that these tiny lines, let her armor turn anyone wearing it into an effective brute, four times as strong as they were outside the armor.
And to her naked eye, it just looked like some gems and some lines made of gold on armor.
This was what it meant to be a tinker. To forge the technology of the future with the tools of today, or in her case, the tools of yesterday.
Taylor's thoughts turned back to the PRT. She might not have examined anyone else's tinker tech, but something in her told her that hers wasn't different than others, which made her wonder.
Did the PRT even know about these runes? What they would give her for just this scanner? How much would they be willing to give her for these plans. For a device that could show the hints of how tinker tech broke the laws of physics?
She didn't know, but she had a feeling it was getting up there in what she could swing.
Inspired, she turned her scanner on her kiosk that would provide her the recordings of her life, curious what that would show up.
She was not expecting the answer on her screen with that at all. It wasn't blueprints, it wasn't even a picture of it.
It was a single word.
'No'
Whatever god or gods had given her this power, made it quite clear that she wasn't going to get anything from that.
Which only made her wonder if she ever learns who did this to her, as she looked around the warehouse, becoming acutely aware this was all designed by some greater power and given to her with structure and rules she barely understood.
But all of it had a reason behind it, this was not some random chance, even the fact she was given her perks at random was done with intention and design.
It felt humbling to her, as it only confirmed there were beings out there that were literal gods next to her, ones that had chosen her for some reason.
Taylor had no idea what it was, but she hoped it was to be a hero, she did want to be one. But it only brought an undercurrent of concern. If this was what they felt she needed to be a hero, what was her foe?
The only one that came to her mind was the Endbringers. Given the bare hints of what she could grow into that she had, where she might end up and the thoughts that all of this was what was required to destroy one terrified her soul.
This was what was required to kill one of them?!?
*Power Buy Attempt 1.4.3 Strategic Mastery II (100). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
The gaining of a new perk help draw off the terror she was starting to feel, as Taylor felt even if it wasn't her power telling her such, her foes were great, but her power would be enough if she was smart about it. If she used strategy that was.
Which made her wonder how random her power was with how perfectly timed that was, right as she was starting to panic, right as started to wonder how she could handle such a big task, knowledge of strategy filled her mind. Everything from squad tactics, to both long- and short-term strategy and how-to best lead people that followed her.
With it, she could already feel vague suggestions to her long term plans that it brought to better refine them.
The perk wasn't done, there was another level hiding behind it, she could lock in. But the perk itself suggested that was a poor idea as the gains from a new perk would far outstrip the minor refinements to plans a better version of this could do.
Having more options led to far better plans then deeply refined plans with lesser resources. You didn't need to be a Strategic mastermind to win a battle when your foes had wooden sticks and you had fighter jets. And even the best Strategic mastermind couldn't win that in reverse, unless you defined win as not die and just hide until they gave up.
Because of that, she didn't lock in the next level, as her thoughts went to her own personal long term plans, seeing what suggestions it made, noting that made each one clear, even if she agreed with them she knew that they were not from herself but her powers, and she still had to choose to accept them.
Her long-term plan of joining the Protectorate was fine, but some things she had done to that end needed to be revised according to it.
She had just assumed she would find a team she was happy with, but never tried to figure out which team.
She wanted to learn how the wards were but hadn't done anything more than basic research on that front.
Her strategy had flaws, mostly minor flaws rather than fundamental flaws, but they were flaws she needed to correct if she was going to make progress on her goals.
The goal her perk suggested on focusing due to it time limit was evaluating if she wanted to join the wards or not, and outside of lacking gear she wanted to bring along in case something went wrong, her new power didn't find any real flaws in her goals.
As a rule the PRT made quite clear to the public, unless you followed very specific rules about engaging with them. The Wards treated new and unknown capes as extremely hostile, as if they were some unholy combination of Jack Slash and Heartbreaker.
Deviate from that narrow line, and it was assumed you were attacking the wards. So follow the rules on how to meet them, or else.
Her desire to build a reputation first was sound, because with heroic deeds to her names, the Wards wouldn't have to treat her like heartbreaker 2.0, who was going to master then and run away with whatever force was required to do such, the second they saw her.
They could just talk to her. But only after she had a reputation. Once they knew her overall powers and that she was hero, things became a lot easier, and she could just walk up to them on the street and talk to them in costume.
Out of costume wasn't an option for rather clear reasons.
Starting to build her reputation first was a reasonable first step to her goal of joining the wards if they were acceptable, since it also supported all of her other long-term goals as well. If she was going to tell the Protectorate what team she would join, it would be much easier if she was a known hero with good deeds to her name already.
0o0
That night, Taylor waited until after her scanner reported her dad was in a deep sleep, before she made her way downstairs.
Her enchanted clothing made her footsteps as light as a cat, and on making certain she was alone before she went out the back door, made her way out.
Despite the fact she could have used her sensor to make sure no one was around when she left in full costume, and she could move surprisingly silently in her armor thanks to the upgrades, she knew that her scanner could be fooled, and it was safer to change away from her home.
Just because the sensors wasn't showing anyone nearby, did not mean there was no one nearby. It could be fooled trivially if you knew how and even by accident in some cases.
So, she went a short distance from her house, watching the scanner as she went, before making her way to a locked door to use it to access her warehouse, quickly changing into her costume before walking back out into the cool night air.
Looking around for the first time in armor, she considered how she was going to do this.
She needed to get within 10 meters to know any more details than some life form here and was currently set to that it did require enough 'life energy' that she wouldn't pick up on anything that wasn't human or human like unless it was unusually massive.
Human sized animals didn't count, unless they were of at least human intelligence. Things that were smarter had more 'life energy' which was what the scanner picked up on to tell it was a person and not a rock shaped like a person.
Well she could let it show her all life, she didn't see any reason to get a list of bugs, dogs and cats about, and the odds of a random bear or any human or large size animal in downtown was slim enough she considered it a reasonable risk.
Her plan was simple enough, she would make her way to the boardwalk, then to downtown, before heading back home. Swing closer to any life signs to get a general health check and only close in more if she found something wrong. It seemed reasonable and her Strategic Mastery didn't find any glaring flaws in it either.
Turning to face the boardwalk, she made her way into the night, her first ever patrol as a hero.
0o0
It took Taylor a few more times than she would ever admit to anyone later, to realize that life signs in a store after hours did not mean criminal inside the store robbing the place.
Nor was there some massive crime wave hitting the boardwalk that night, just because there was someone in every store. That was just the night security forces doing their jobs, and she was extremely happy she figured that out before she ambushed one of them and tried to arrest them for robbing the same store, that they were in charge of protecting.
Things didn't get that better on that end as the next group turned out to be just homeless seeking shelter from the freezing weather outside in abandoned buildings.
Criminals given they were legally trespassing by staying there, but not something she wanted to respond by kicking them out.
She rather build them a shelter they could stay in, but she couldn't do that right now, so she just left them along, trying not to think about how bad this city was and how much there was to fix.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.1 Thanatologist (200). Not bought. Banked 100 points. *
Taylor stopped in her patrol as her power rewarded her with a charge and tried to acquire a perk, only to open her eyes wide as what it had failed to her entered her mind.
The word Thanatologist wasn't known to her before, but what it did was still passed on. It was skills around the creation of the undead. As in, it required dead people to use.
Taylor nope out of selecting that one and for the first time since she got her power was extremely pleased that she hadn't gotten a perk given the context of that. It was far worse than worthless, she rather get her windows perk a thousand times then get that one again.
Well she was trying to focus on how to make her power never try and give her that again her sensor went off indicating that a life sign was moving quickly. Every time before it had been a person in a car driving nearby, but she studied it anyway just in case it wasn't that this time.
Finding a figure on a path that would take them out of range within a few seconds due to it angle to her and was moving very quickly.
Giving the map of the area put whomever it was in an alleyway, rather than on the street, Taylor started to move in their direction a bit, only to start running when two more figured appeared behind it, slightly faster.
Her heart soured as she realized what this meant.
Her first ever crime she would stop, on her first night out.
Taylor felt quite pleased, only to bite that down. She was a hero, she should be happy if she didn't find crime when she went on patrol, not pleased that she did.
Even if her powers like it, since she could tell she had gotten a fair amount of her next charge already, not even minutes after she got the last one. This was extremely interesting to her benefactor.
Rushing at full speed into the night, she didn't sound like a woman in armor giving chase, rather her hurried pace would have had anyone that saw her in person look to see if perhaps they had lost their hearing given most animals made more noise than she did running.
But as fast as she was, she had started far enough away that the two figures giving chase to the first were just fast enough that before Taylor got there, they managed to grab whoever it was. Stopping the third where they had met up.
Taylor paused when she got within 10 meters range a few seconds later as they were stopped, and she wanted a bit more information.
The one that had been running was a woman, and at this range her scanner could say she was slightly injured, well the two chasing her were both men that were also slightly injured as well.
Her scanner couldn't tell her more than that at range, and Taylor had to pause as she saw all three individuals were injured slightly as a thought crossed her mind.
This could have been a criminal running from two police officers that caught her. She should try and figure out what was going on before she showed herself if she could. No need to add assaulting a police officer catching a criminal to her list of crimes she almost did that night after all.
It was easy enough to move forward silently, as Taylor peeked down the alleyway that they had caught her.
Even in the dim light, Taylor could tell that they were not police officers, given they clearly had ABB gang markings on them.
Taylor could see that they had the woman on the ground with duck tape over her mouth and were currently tying her up.
Not police officers Taylor noted to herself, as she stepped forward and decided to call out a warning.
"Stop what you are doing."
Taylor winced to herself as soon as she said that, it sounded a lot better in her mind then out of her mouth. It was more of a squeak, and she was quite sure how nervous she was quite clear.
The two men looked at her, clearly expecting a bystander.
Taylor could see the exact instant they realized she wasn't likely a bystander on their faces given her armor.
"Cape!"
They both turned and ran away from her, one of them stepping hard on to the woman with a thud that didn't sound good to Taylor, and they booked it.
As much as Taylor wanted to give chase, she was worried about the woman, more so after one had stepped on her chest with a thud.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.30 Private Reality (600). Not Bought. Banked 200 points. *
Too concerned about the woman to focus on what the perk she had missed was, Taylor rushed to the woman, only vaguely noting that the perk it had missed had to do with her warehouse size in some way, which most certainly wasn't anything that might let her help her right now.
Kneeling next to the already bound woman who was clearly in pain, she ran her scanner over her. It had listed her as moderately injured, and she was bleeding in minor amounts under the skin over a large part of her body.
Touching the woman to activate her healing touch, she tried to consider what to do next.
She could see fear in the woman's eyes, which made her pause only long enough to realize that it was because she hadn't already untied her, and likely assumed that she wasn't much better off under her then the two gang members. Most capes were villains after all.
That at least was something that was easily solved, as she reached for the woman, who was doing her best to try and slid away from her, but as she was bound on wrists and legs with duck tape over her mouth, she couldn't move that quickly.
Turning her over gently, feeling her shake under her touch, and not strong enough to stop Taylor from turning her over to access her wrists, Taylor then held her arm with one hand, then carefully withdrew the knife she had on hand, so she didn't have to her use sword to cut things. Using it to cut the duck tape as carefully as she could without hurting her.
Once freed, Taylor let go and moved a step back as her hand flew up to her face to tear off the duck tape over her mouth.
As she did such, the fear and panic that was in her eyes faded away to more wariness.
With a wince she yanked the tap off and then went for the binding on her legs, without taking her eyes off her savior.
"I don't think I heard of you before, who are you?"
Taylor started to answer, stopped when she realized she was about to say 'Taylor', then went wide eye as she recalled she hadn't picked out a cape name yet.
All these weeks with her powers, and she hadn't even considered that she needed one.
Desperate for anything to change the topic, she saw the woman trying to get the tape off.
Taylor turned her knife around, so she was holding it by the blade, and offered the handle to her.
The woman had frozen as she started forward, only until she saw how it was handled. Then she took it and cut her own legs free.
"Are you not able to speak for some reason?" She asked as she started to move, only for Taylor to recall what her scanner had said.
"Don't move your're hurt."
The woman stopped trying to get up and asked. "How badly?"
"Moderately."
"I meant exactly how am I injured?"
"I don't really know ah…" Taylor gaze shot to the scanner, and she repeated what it said. "Bleeding under your epidermis layer… your skin."
"I certainly took a few bruises, but I would be more concerned with internal bleeding other than that kind. Is there something else?"
Taylor studied the scanner hoping it would somehow inform her how to answer the woman's question.
"Is that data on your scanner something I can read?"
Deciding that was better, she handed it over to the woman to look at.
She looked at the data quickly, eyes going wide making it extremely clear how impressed she was with what she was reading, then she focused entirely on what it said, poking at it a bit before she asked.
"What other injuries do I have?"
"Only what it says there. I don't really know what they mean other than you have them."
"So you saw it said moderate and thought I was dying?"
"Ah, not quite? More like you could make it worse if you moved too quickly or something."
"Before the EMTs get here." The woman noted.
With that, a second thing she had forgotten to do hit Taylor like a freight train.
She didn't have a cell phone on her, she hadn't even considered getting such, wondering how she forgotten something as basic as a cellphone with Strategic Mastery, she was immediately rewarded with the answer.
Strategic Mastery didn't make her ability to plan perfect. It could refine things she had considered, but it couldn't outright tell her things she had forgotten to completely consider herself.
She wanted to bring along a list of items in case someone was hurt, so it had informed her of what to bring, but a cell phone to call for emergency services hadn't entered her mind.
"Did you call them?" the woman asked when she didn't get an answer after a bit.
"No I… It my first night out, I didn't really think to bring a cell phone." Taylor admitted to her.
"I got mine, but is everything on this scanner of yours, everything that iswrong with me?"
"It is."
"In that case, I'll just walk back to the hospital."
"Back?"
"You do know where you are right now, right?"
At the shake of a head, the woman sighed and informed her.
"A few blocks from Brockton Bay General Hospital, I'm an ER Doctor there. Doctor Susan Yamamoto. They tried to grab me as I was returning to my car to head home after my shift. I couldn't have run more than a few blocks. Mind escorting me there?"
"Not at all." Taylor agreed, that was way easier than considering everything she did wrong right now.
Susan got up and handed the scanner back to Taylor, then asked.
"What is your name anyway?"
Deciding that walking the entire time quietly might not be a good idea for that question, Taylor returned a simple answer.
"I haven't picked one yet."
Shock filled Susan's face as she looked at Taylor, then gave her a good long look up and down, clearly not believing such from the look on face, only reinforced by her words that followed.
"With power armor that good? That good of a scanner that looks like something we get from a medical supply center rather than junk glued together? I only seen such on Protectorate Tinkers. Big name Protectorate Tinkers."
Taylor didn't answer, rather she turned her head away in shame.
"Hey, it okay. I get picking a name is hard. I got two kids of my own, and I had to spend months before I knew what to name them, barely knowing before they were born. I suppose it's even harder for capes given they can't just pick what they like. Naming my daughter the same as someone in the Protectorate wouldn't see me in jail."
A silent nod was all that was returned to that.
"First night out huh?" Susan noted after she realized there would be no reply from her savior to that.
Another silent nod.
"Then you don't know about the unwritten rules?"
"The what rules?"
"The unwritten rules, I might as well tell you about them on the way back. The rules are simple but keep one thing in mind. They are called unwritten rules, because they only have as much legal weight behind them as the local capes as a whole, heroes and villains choose to respect them. If you ask the PRT about them, they say that the Unwritten rules are gentlemen agreements only and hold no bearing on the law. But only those quite certain they can take anyone else nearby would dare outright break them. If you follow them, capes that also follow them will do the same to you. If you don't they don't."
After a pause to let it sink in, the older woman continued.
"The rules are simple. Don't maim or murder, don't rape, don't unmask anyone, don't go after families. They get a lot more nuanced after that, since it's entirely on what the locals agree they are. So every town has additional ones, but those that follow those four are generally considered proper and go to normal jail if arrested for a crime. Those that don't go to the Birdcage or are outright executed on capture."
"Villains and Heroes?!?"
"You easily can kill in the self-defense of someone else, but that doesn't change the fact legally it's murder until the courts rule it self-defense. I hope it's only the last two I need to really tell you not to do. But let's start with the first as you might find the need to do such to protect someone. Although the rule is don't maim or murder, it better said as don't escalate. If they bring police batons, you don't bring knives. If they bring knifes, you can bring knives but don't bring guns and such. Most capes fight with blunt weapons or bare hand because of this. Besides being safer for you, it is also safer for them. A villain you are arresting know there is little danger of being accidentally killed if they don't have a weapon, but if you're known for bring around that sword of yours, you are going to see people always using knifes and swords on you in return. But not guns. Not unless you bring one first."
"Oh, that makes a lot of sense."
"Yes, but it not the law. You don't have to do that, self-defense does justify killing in the right situations, but if you are known to do not endanger people enough that they could die fighting you, then those you fight won't push you to the edge and risk killing you as well. I am going to assume you're a decent person and I don't need to cover the second rule in any depth whatsoever, so the third one is easy enough. Well it only illegal to unmask heroes that are listed as such by the PRT. Even the PRT respects the unwritten rules in this regard, so they don't unmask people until they get kill orders, which is why despite the fact that Empire 88 been in this city for years, no one outside of them knows who Kaiser is. If the PRT couldn't tell with all the thinkers they got on hire, they should fire them all and replace them. They know, but since unmasking a cape opens both them and their families to retaliation, they don't do such until they decided you are better off dead. Capes that snub that one tends not to last long, because the villains will gang up and take them down, and the Protectorate generally lets them without interfering. It might not be law, but it keeps things safer, when the villains don't think that they can't just take off their mask and give up a life of crime, that when they jump to the outright murder of victims rather than bruises they can heal on their own in a few weeks. Desperate people do desperate things."
The pair arrived near the hospital and Susan finished with.
"Just don't forget it not a law you can invoke unless you can get the local criminals to agree with your version of the events. How much force it has is as much as those who respect it around here gives it, no more no less. That the rules in a nutshell, and all you need to know since they more of a gentlemen's agreement and not law. I should get inside and get myself checked over."
With that, she started to move inside, but stopped when Taylor spoke up to address her.
"Before you go."
"What?"
"Do you know why they grabbed you?"
"That? Likely because of my husband, he is Japanese after all."
The woman in question was clearly white and as far as Taylor could see, if it wasn't for her black hair would have fit in nicely with the Nazi's ideal race. She had lovely blue eyes now that she could see them in the light of the hospital. It wouldn't be a simple job to make her blonde with how dark her hair was, but if she had blonde hair, she would have been the picture of an 'average ideal woman' by their standards. She wasn't even remotely a model in appearance, but good enough looking to basically be a stand in on a tv show sort of deal.
"They wanted to recruit him by kidnapping you?"
"It is more likely not slurring the bloodline by stopping him from being with a Gaijin." Susan replied. "One of the good things of not being my husband's biological daughter is my eldest, Mei, doesn't get recruited by them and my youngest Shiro only in the 3rd grade, so he is way too young to do such yet. It is not the first time this happened, although they caught me this time, normally I get away when some new recruits into the ABB decide I am a good target to prove they are worthy of the gang."
"Normally?" Taylor repeated at that.
"Brockton Bay is a shithole, I guess you new the area if you didn't know that. I don't know what brought you here, but you might want to move onto a more peaceful city. If you're not white, Empire 88 will hate you, if you're not Asian the ABB will hate you and if you are neither they both be gunning for you. I should go get checked out, thank you again for saving me from them, you likely saved my life."
Taylor watched the woman make her way into the hospital but didn't follow, the fact that she could qualify the outcome of being kidnapped by the ABB because of her husband as normally escaped, somehow made this city seem a whole lot darker than it had been before.
She knew Brockton Bay was a horrible place on Earth, but surely a woman in the city shouldn't be subjected to attempted kidnappings enough to need to qualify that normally her kidnapping to be tortured to death, ended up with her getting away.
0o0
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
0o0
*Power Buy Attempt 3.6.7 Profession: Tailoring (Zen Master) (World of Warcraft) (300). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Taylor was woken up by her power activating and giving her a new perk. After flaying around in bed a bit due to the suddenness of how she was woken up, she managed to regroup enough to understand what had woken her, and that she wasn't under attack by anything other than her power making her stronger.
Looking quite the mess between how tired she still was, her random flaying in her bed doing no good for her appearances either. She found only hazy memories of waking up to see her dad off before going back to bed, telling her what had happened after she got home, she looked over at the clock to see it was just before noon.
She was still ready to sleep for at least a few more hours.
Yawning, she considered her new perk, wishing it was something to let her need less sleep. She was going to need to do shorter patrols otherwise and given the very last thing had been saving Susan's life last night, she would have been kidnapped, likely raped and killed had Taylor not been there.
Which meant she had done a lot of good, but unless she solved the issue of sleep, she wasn't going to be able to keep doing as much good when she had to start going back to school.
The haze faded from her mind as she understood what her new perk was, and it was quite impressive.
She had gained a supernatural ability at tailoring, that made her a Zen master in that craft. Unrivaled in by her peers, so long as it was something made of cloth.
Although it brought no ideas of fashion with it, she could tell that if she had a design, she could make any outfit she was asked to do such. As such, anything she made would have the qualify to be fit for a central piece in a major museum exhibit, should she decide she wanted to do that. All she needed to be told was some rough image of the final product and she could turn it into a work of art.
The far more useful side of this was the fact she could now make outright magical items, so long as they were made of cloth. Bags that were bigger on the inside, carpets that could fly. Clothing that didn't have to be shaped to be enchanted with basic effects.
What more, she could drop the need for using gold thread in her clothing as she could encase the enchanting into normal thread, meaning that careful examination of her gear wouldn't show she had gold running through it.
It was much better for her than the perk she had decided to abandon last night that would have just made her warehouse larger.
Space was not something she was lacking in her warehouse right now, nor at the rate of her tinkering might not ever be a concern in her lifetime unless she started collecting a lot of stuff made by other people.
Or her powers gave her some big things.
Looking down at her bed, debating how much she wanted to sleep more versus getting up and reworking her clothing to be much better now that she was no longer limited by shaped items, a thought passed her mind that made her pause as she refocused on the collection of these three perks.
She could make magical cloth, and anything related to magical cloth, which included blankets that would let her sleep soundly and comfortably no matter how rough the location she wanted to sleep in.
On it own it was useless if she wasn't camping, since her bed was comfy enough on it own to be luring her in with promises of its warmth cuddling her.
But that perk didn't have to make alone, drawing on the power gems she could make from the combination of Geneforge and Deadspace, then drawing on dead space again to allow her to upgrade a tool within it function, she could upgrade her bedsheets to make her sleep better.
As in, she would need much less sleep to be fully rested.
Four levels of upgrades would be limited to about an hour off the time she needed at best, but she could perk this within the same upgrade for an effective 2 upgrades.
Cutting her time required for sleep down to 2 hours per night.
That was more than enough to get her out of bed to go start on such, only pausing as she recalled the fact that Susan had pointed out she didn't have a name, and she didn't have a cellphone.
Both were issues to resolve, but after she made her blankets of restful sleep, she wouldn't be able to go out tonight as a cape anyway with how tired she was, and without those and a nap, it didn't matter if she had them or not.
0o0
By the time Taylor finished her bedsheet of restful sleep, and put them to very good use in an afternoon nap, it was too late to head out to the library to look up capes, and lacking the internet access at home, she had no option but to wait until tomorrow.
Likewise, cellphone shopping was off the table as well.
Thanks to said sheets, she wasn't able to fall asleep either, so she waited until after her dad was asleep to make her way into her workshop to start remaking her clothes, frowning as she looked at how the cheap mass-produced cloth made up her outfit offended her powers.
She knew the stuff was cheap, that was half the reason she bought it, but her powers felt like they were being insulted if she wore something like this.
Taylor sighed at that, not wanting to wonder what sort of extremely fancy dress she had to wear to make her powers happy about her clothes and how she would ever get away with it in school, only to pause as told her it didn't need to fancy. They didn't care what her clothes looked like.
Just that they were not made like the crap. She would make far better herself by pure accident. Half thrown together dresses to just test for ideas would look far better than her clothes right now. Forget anything she tried to make look good.
The tailoring ability from the perk was powerful enough that even if she had no idea of fashion, whatever she made would at least look decent, and if she did know fashion, she could easily get the big name people wanting her to make outfits for them.
Considering this and deciding there was no reason not to remake them completely, as she wanted as much protection on her as she could get all times. It was also easier than breaking it up her existing clothes and remaking them as magical items, so she settled in to start to do such, only to stop mid cut of a bolt of cloth when her power activated again.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.2.4 Mental Resistance II (100). Bought. Banked 0 points. *
With a sharp breath, Taylor realized what she had just been handed, the fact there was another level to it, and she locked it in several times to make sure she didn't forget to do such. Then doubled checked again to make certain she really had.
Besides granting her an immunity to being intimidated, it granted her a 'high level of resistance' to outright mind control.
The greatest threat there was out there. Masters.
The Simurgh, Heartbreaker and more; More capes than Taylor knew about and feared even more than the PRT knew of and could deal with.
Any one of them could decide to mind control her, and she would lose all of her free will. As a tinker, she had even more fear for the Simurgh.
But this perk changed that, it wouldn't make her immune to mind control, but resistant enough that as long as she didn't do something stupid like try to give the Simurgh a hug, she likely could survive what they could pull off before she could get away, and then likely remove whatever they did through the use of Mental Awareness Refinement.
Level 2 was highly resistant, and more critically granted immunity to what the level 1 perk made her highly resistant to.
There was no doubt in her mind that level 3 was outright mind control immunity.
Pausing to consider the branches of her body mod she knew of, Taylor wondered if there was something similar to that granted immunity precogs, but unable to see most of the perks, she knew wasting charges on just that chance wasn't a good idea. After all the item to do such might be under her warehouse or even the forge.
She wanted to say it would be under body, but she couldn't say for certain enough to risk sending things that way until she knew better given the increased cost to do such. She just have to hope that the odds were in her favor.
0o0
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
0o0
Taylor found picking a good cape name for what she could do extremely difficult.
After all, what did she call herself given that she would grow to literal godly levels? With what she could do with just 3, no, 4 perks there was stuff she could do with the scanner even if it was extremely narrow, what would she look like with 10? 100? All 532?
The answer was simple enough, she should choose a name of a god for a cape name.
Which even she knew was the height of egoistic. No one humble would name themselves after a god except by accident.
But, as she tried to consider anything else, her Forge seemed to flicker in her mind, reminding her it was the forge of the gods and it would her to choose a name worthy of a god.
Which as far as she could tell, the only way to do such, was to take the name of a god from some mythology and claim it as her own.
Sighing, Taylor pulled up a list of god figures in mythology on the internet, which took her to the list maintained on PHO by the PRT as the first result, and giving that she decided it was a fair place to start her research.
At the very top was the extremely few that the Protectorate used, because you had to be the best of the best to be worthy to call yourself such. The PRT okaying such basically meant you were a Triumvirate tier cape in their eyes. For good, or for Bad.
The list of currently active villains with such godly names was longer but compared to those currently inactive or never claimed was rather short.
With supervillains willing to kill you for the reputation, claiming the name of a god, was inviting such. Likewise, to those that had named assigned by the PRT, they only did such for the big S-class threats.
There was plenty of options, but nothing that stood out.
Searching the list slowly names of gods of craftsmen came up, but for some reason her power didn't seem to like it, which was puzzling. She had expected her powers to be pushing for a name like Hephaestus or Vulcan.
But just indifference echoed there like every other god she could see loosely connected to forging and crafting.
Resolving to go over the entire list, wondering if it didn't care what name just so long as it was the name of a god. Taylor scanned each name regardless of what mythology it was from, and what they could do, trying to see if anything reacted like the way her power gave her a gentle push to use the name of a god or not.
At the sight of one name, a slight tweak, the same tweak that had been telling her to choose the name of a god, echo though her power, making it clear whoever gave this to her like this name she had just read, but at the same time they made it clear she didn't have to choose this one for her cape name.
Taylor stared at the name that whatever god had given her this power wanted her to use.
Selene, The Greek Goddess of the Moon.
Completely lost and puzzled by this, she looked up the details of the goddess in question, only to very quickly realize why this name had been chosen as she read the files on her.
Selene as the literal personification of the Moon, guarded the night. Terms for her were not just all seeing and wise, but as benevolent as well.
In a way it could be said that she was the one who guarded the night from evil.
Making sure she wasn't just the first name on a given a list of options for her to choose from, Taylor continued down them, finding that of them, only Selene gave the response and it was only the first time she looked at it. The push to use it, like to use a god's name was gone, still remembered, but no longer would it raise the point with her again.
Her powers had indicated which way it wanted her to go.
She had to decide if she would accept it or choose another name.
When she knew that if she wasn't interesting, she would stop earning charges.
Would it be more interesting for her to choose another name? Or would it be dangerous to do such?
She didn't know, she couldn't know.
But if she assumed the fact her powers wanted the name of a goddess for her… she might as well take it. She had no better ideas herself.
Mindful she would need to do some outreach later on PHO, New Wave did most of theirs on PHO, she checked to see if Selene was free for an account name.
To her very much surprise, it was free, so she registered the account, then turned her thoughts to how she should change her design of her armor to match her name.
Clearly, she wouldn't wear the dress that Selene was often shown in, but she could add something to her armor to hint to that, maybe a crescent moon on her chest with the silver gem that acted as the focus for her regenerative shield?
If she was making a dress she could do something extremely fancy, like maybe the image of Selene herself in a chariot across her body in some way, but her tailor's ability to perfect recreate an image in cloth didn't extend to armor, and she didn't want to make some sort of shirt to put over her armor as that would interfere with it ability to protect her.
Thoughts turned to design, wondering what would look best for her, as she felt her charges tick upwards to 1 out of the 2 charges she needed for the next level of Mental Resistance.
0o0
Saturday, January 28th, 2011
0o0
Unable to go on patrols until her redesigns on her armor was finished, it was very late Friday, or rather extremely early Saturday morning when Taylor made it out in costume.
Or rather Selene, as she adjusted her thoughts to think of herself as.
Before she departed, she doubled checked she had everything she needed. An enchanted bag of holding with any medical supplies she could guess that might be required, but even more critically, a cellphone she had bought at the store for just 20 dollars.
There was no service plan, it was prepaid only. It came with 10 minutes and then was good for emergency calls only. Since she only planned to call 911 with it, she hadn't bothered to grab the minute's card at all. The cheapest one was 20 dollars on its own, and she knew that 20 dollars for 100 minutes was not a good price at all.
Stepping out into the crisp winter air, Selene debated her path, then set forward on roughly the same route she took last time, deciding it was better to stick to a route she had already done once before until she got the hang of things.
With the aid of her blanket, she could get all the sleep she needed in just 2 hours, and she had more time than that before it was late enough to go out on patrol so that her dad didn't know what she was doing.
0o0
At first the patrol went much better than last time, as Selene didn't have to stop at every life sign in a building thinking they might be a robber and check it out. She just assumed those inside buildings were supposed to be there and moved on.
This allowed her to clear a lot more distance, but she came to an abrupt halt as something unusual appeared on her scanner.
In one of the office buildings, the topological scan was blank, showing a void in the middle of said building.
That made her stop to look in its direction puzzled; quite certain she would have noticed that last time.
Several things that could cause such came to mind, and had this been a bank, the PRT HQ or other such structure, she would have assumed it was just a secured room inside, and if this had been a new route, she would have assumed the same here.
Blocking her scanner did not take parahuman powers, just a know how of what it couldn't scan though, of which the quick answer was too much mass. There were much easier ways to block it then just enough mass, but that was the quick answer.
Then she noticed the area that was not on her sensor was shrinking.
Walls don't normally shrink on their own.
But jamming fields of some kind did.
Moving closer, Selene circled the building trying to get a look inside when she found a door that was wide open. A van parked nearby, also open, empty and abandoned with the engine still running.
Inside the building she could see the hallway was partly filled with darkness, which got thicker as it went further inside, fading away and letting her sensor see more as it did such.
It took a few glances back and forth before it hit her what was going on. She even read about this cape.
Grue, who created a cloud of darkness. This darkness couldn't be blown away and blocked cameras, and now that she had tested it, her sensor as well.
It faded over time, so if he was inside with some gang members, robbing this place… they likely had stopped in a room somewhere, and the parts fading out was where he had been before.
Her heartbeat picked up at that, as she felt her power earn the final charge she needed for the locked perk, and it became active.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.2.4 Mental Resistance III (100) + 100 Lock Tax. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Complete immunity to mind control with no more ranks to lock in.
Carefully balancing the odds, Selene decided that this was in her favor.
Grue was an adult man, and a big one at that given what she read about him.
Her armor made her four times stronger, and her power made her half peak human before the weeks of hard work and exercise.
She was at least twice peak human, and maybe closer to 3 times by now with all her hard work. Grue and a bunch of gang members robbing a building wouldn't be a threat to her without guns. Given that he wasn't known to use such, she should be fine there given the unwritten rules.
Debating about drawing her sword, she left it sheathed as she stood by the door waiting, not stupid enough to go inside, she wouldn't be able to see in the darkness.
She would grab them when they got out, catching them off guard when they walked out of the darkness themselves.
Just when she thought about calling the PRT now, the darkness started to expand outwards, and she knew that she wouldn't have time to do such.
So watching carefully, she saw the darkness start to spread down the hallway in front of her, before it came to a sudden halt, then started to spread in other direction.
It puzzled her for a bit until Selene realized that Grue must have been able to see though his darkness, he didn't leave a hole inside that she could see him like the curtain she was thinking about.
Since Grue could see though his darkness, he must have just seen her and stopped to wait.
"Surrender now villains." Selene called into the darkness, wondering what he would do. She didn't think it was a good idea to go rushing in, but she didn't think Grue was stupid enough to come walking out this way either.
There were other doors to the building.
Watching her sensor to see if he was doing that, she could see that the darkness was spreading to the rooms nearby, but not away from her. Likely because it was centered on him and thus filling in the spaces close to him now that he wasn't moving and thinking of his next move.
Suddenly, without warning, there was a flicker as a woman appeared on the sensor just long enough to be picked up, close enough to report she was a woman in good health.
Before Selene had even looked in her direction she was off the sensor and looking at the darkness in the window.
Waiting, well trying to think of anything that didn't require her to run into pure darkness, but not able to come up, she saw the darkness start to spread in the direction away from her. She waited a minute before she started to run to get in front of it, stopping outside the front door. It opened and stopped again. Then it surged past at a right angle, and she gave chase until she realized how fast that they were moving.
Her armor made her twice as fast as a human sprinting could be, nearly as fast as a car on the highway, and they were outpacing her.
How did Grue move so fast? Was he also a brute in secret?
But even if he was, that meant either he left his gang members behind, or he was alone.
Not giving to chase since an unknown brute changed a lot, Selene watched the building for any signs of them, but when the darkness faded and her sensors could see no one inside, she sighed and decided to leave.
As she did such, she felt another charge come on, and she focused on it.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.3.6 Corruption Resistance cost 100. Bought. Banked 0 points. *
A perk that was rather interesting to go with her immunity to mind control. She now had immunity to any corruption of her soul unless she allowed it and would be aware of any such actions that would cause that.
It was the sort of protection you never wanted to need, but if it was that or nothing, you wouldn't say no to for a very good reason.
00o
End of Chapter 02
0o0
Interlude 01: The Undersiders
0o0
It was supposed to be a nice and easy job, much like several such jobs the Undersiders had undertaken over the last 6 months together.
Things were normal at first, Grue blacked out the area they were in, leaving a gap large enough for them to see inside with flashlights. Pulling the darkness away from whatever they needed to interact in.
Tattletale unlocked doors, computers and whatever else was in their way. Bitch and Regent kept a look out for threats, but otherwise like Grue was more there to help carry things and not do any fighting. Since all this time was data off the computer, they gathered in the room and waited as Tattletale collected such. All they would be walking out with when this was over was a flash drive with the information their boss wanted and nothing else.
Nothing had gone wrong with that, and it was only on the way out that suddenly the plan fell off the rails.
"Stop!" Grue called out as they almost reached the door when he saw a what clearly to his eyes was a new cape standing outside of it in power armor, a sheath sword on her hip, and some sort of device in her hands pointed down the hallway at them.
"Why?" Regent asked.
"There a cape outside, new one."
"There is?" Tattletale noted as she looked in the direction of the door. "I can't get anything under your power, what he is doing?"
"I think it a she given the shape and markings on her power armor." Grue replied. "Just standing there pointing something at the doorway, too far for me to see what other than it in her hand. She got a sword as well, but it sheathed right now."
"Just one, I can take her." Bitch noted as she indicated to her dogs.
"Boss is paying extra to keep this quiet." Tattletale reminded Bitch. The girl glared at her but didn't say anything on that. "I peek out a side room, yell if she moves."
With that Tattletale headed to the room next to them, Grue carefully extending his shadows around her to coat the room she entered before she went in then leaving a void in the middle for her to move around in with her flashlight.
Grue could tell when Tattletale peeked out because the woman in armor outside immediately turned in her direction and kept looking at her.
"Tattletale-"
"I saw it, already back inside." Tattletale shouted from the room, and made her way over quickly, still yelling, so they could be heard as she ran then walked to rejoin them. "Tinker, in power armor like you guessed. The item in her hand is a sensor. She noticed us here on it due to the shielding effect of your darkness, but she can't locate us exactly under your darkness. Only that your Darkness is here. I didn't get a long enough look at her to tell if she called the white hats or not, but I did get enough to see that just the tip of her stuff, her armor gives her a large brute rating on its own. I have to research her later to tell you more, but we should be assuming Armsmaster in ability, not L33t until I can get more on her."
"Well shit." Regent observed.
"It not that bad yet, her sensor can't locate where we are in Grue's darkness. We go out the front and run, and we get out of range. No more than half a mile, likely a quarter at most. Anything less than that, and she wouldn't have noticed us unless she was already on her way here. Anything more and she would have shown up sooner."
"So we turn tail and run?" Bitch asked.
"Yes, we do." Grue told her firmly.
"We should prepare the dogs anyway before we run, in case she tries to follow us in. Right now she's trying to study your effect Grue, well I can't get a longer read without her noticing, she's not going to wait forever."
0o0
Back at their base, Lisa relaxed. Despite the fact the cape had tried to give chase at first, they got away, and they had stayed under Grue's darkness for a good distance before she checked and confirmed that they were not being followed.
A successful mission, even if there was an unexpected complication.
She would need to turn the data over in person tomorrow, but she had to let Coil know now, so he could drop his safety timeline and accept the success here.
Delaying that, would be extremely unpleasant for her. She might have managed avoiding all the timeline when he punished her for making him keep up a safety timeline past what conditions he told her, but she hadn't avoided knowing what she had only barely escaped out on experiencing firsthand all those times, with the clear message was that if she went too far, it wouldn't be the alternate her that experienced it, but herself first hand.
He always could choose which he wanted to keep after he got done with her in both after all.
Lisa pulled out her phone and dialed it up, knowing he was ready for her to do such. He wouldn't let her call off the safety timeline if he wasn't ready to do such the instant she called.
It defeated the entire purpose of it to do otherwise.
"Hello Lisa."
"Hey Boss. Mission was a success with only a minor deviation to note."
"Oh?"
"A new cape showed up. Not one I have seen before, a tinker with decent power armor and some sort of sensor that picked up Grue's darkness and drew her interest to our crime. Good enough of a sensor that she focused on me as soon as I looked at her myself, so I didn't get much of a look just yet. We got out with the data and other than that nothing else happened."
"Describe her."
Lisa rattled off what she got of the very brief look at the cape, mixed with what Brian had shared with her from what he could see in the hallway, which wasn't that much, then added in. "I am going to be looking for various security footage to see if I can get a better picture of her. She might have been planning to hit the same place we did. Having a tinker would be useful for the Undersiders."
"I agree. Look into it and let me know if you need any safety around her." Coil confirmed.
Lisa swallowed as she understood what he meant there. If she asked for that, either she better bring something good, or she would be punished.
How, Lisa really didn't want to know more than she had already been forced to figure out by Coil already as punishments for her misbehavior, one step removed from experiencing it personally. But that was already bad enough, and she knew it was only on his grace that he hadn't already had her keep the very personal and very painful experiences of one of her sessions under him.
As bad as asking for one that she didn't really need would be for her, it would be even worse for her if he felt like she should have asked for one and didn't.
Coil would decide if it was a good enough request or not and choosing to never ask for fear of making a bad request would just get her a worse punishment than if it had been a bad request in his eyes. One that he promised she wouldn't lose to an alternate timeline, to make sure she never tried such again. So long as she kept up a string of reasonable requests for a safe timeline, even if he never used them, she would be fine.
She walked a very narrow tightrope, and too much either way would see her in pain one way or another.
"I would like a basic profile on her by the end of next week. Name, leanings, what gear she made so far." Coil finished, and Lisa nodded, the time frame was normal for a new cape. He hadn't heard of her yet and without any concerns that she might interfere, he rather she spent more time refining what she handed over rather than up the minute stuff that they both knew would have errors until she worked them out of it.
Any cape that wasn't still around in a week, wasn't someone they could have recruited or used anyway.
"You will have it boss." She agreed. Lisa couldn't do anything else.
0o0
"What the Fuck?" Lisa outright screamed the next day as wasn't sure if she should trust what her power was telling her about this new cape's gear.
She knew that telling the details of tinker tech was hard until she saw it used, so she should only take it with a grain of salt as limitations would become clear in time as it was used. She got a rough idea of what it could do and about where it was to start with at best.
The fact that the sword was sharp enough to cut bitch's dog like they were made of water was worrying, and would have caused Lisa to think this new cape was in clear need of a lesson in the underwritten rules, was it not for her getting such on her first night out from what she could find from the security camera around the likely route she patrolled. There was still a lot more to check to confirm such, but it looked like such so far.
It wasn't even the fact that her armor made her four times stronger and agile than a human either. Nor was it the fact that her armor resistance showed up as, couldn't even be damaged by the Behemoth on the first blow. It was equally worrying as her sword, but she got the same for Glory Girl, and whatever effect it had would need to recharge before it could work again. So it was a tinker version of Glory Girl's shielding power, which was quite common for tinkers to do. They adapted other parahuman powers into their gear in some way.
The detail of how fast it could do and how strong the armor under it without that effect up required her to see more of it in use.
What had caused her to scream, was her power reporting that said items were self-regenerating to the point that even if the Simurgh wanted to destroy or even alter them, she couldn't, anymore she could destroy the concept of gravity. Sure she could bend it for a while, but unless she kept bending it the very universe would snap back to how it had been before.
Much like her gear. She had made them so solid that they had become as fundamental to the universe as gravity itself. Outright removing them from the universe wouldn't even get rid of them as they just reappear a few days later.
It would take outright destruction of reality itself to destroy them as well.
When her power cited that this tinker's gear couldn't be harmed by two different Endbringers, it was quite clear that the Undersides would want nothing to do with her.
As much as Coil would be angry that she wasn't calling him right now from this discovery alone, Lisa knew that if she did, her orders would be to recruit the girl. A girl with serious heroic tendencies, that was looking into joining the ward, but hadn't because of bad experiences with authority, and wanted to make sure they were safe first.
Lisa didn't care what Coil would do to her for a delay, it couldn't be anything worse than setting a heroic cape with gear better suited to Endbringer fights, whom gear apparently became universal constants as she made them, then street crime on her and her team.
Lisa knew she feel safer if Coil tasked them to go after some member of the Triumvirate for their next job.
Still, considering how much the girl wanted to be a hero…
Perhaps, she could point her at Coil somehow? See how good his safety timelines are when they interacted around a cape that has gear that are literal constants of the universe that Endbringers could destroy for good.
Lisa's thoughts turned very carefully to how she might do such, and how much she might be able to leave that little nugget off from coil's report which she would certainly need to delay to the last minute now. If only for the time to plan what to tell him.
She knew that it would be a timeline she be tortured in to verify it if he had any doubt to it, but so long as she was willing to take something to her grave, he couldn't extract it from her.
Not getting someone with gear that would fit in with the Triumvirate mad at her certainly counted.
She knew that telling the details of tinker tech was hard until she saw it used, so she should only take it with a grain of salt as limitations would become clear in time as it was used. She got a rough idea of what it could do and about where it was to start with at best.
The fact that the sword was sharp enough to cut bitch's dog like they were made of water was worrying, and would have caused Lisa to think this new cape was in clear need of a lesson in the underwritten rules, was it not for her getting such on her first night out from what she could find from the security camera around the likely route she patrolled. There was still a lot more to check to confirm such, but it looked like such so far.
It wasn't even the fact that her armor made her four times stronger and agile than a human either. Nor was it the fact that her armor resistance showed up as, couldn't even be damaged by the Behemoth on the first blow. It was equally worrying as her sword, but she got the same for Glory Girl, and whatever effect it had would need to recharge before it could work again. So it was a tinker version of Glory Girl's shielding power, which was quite common for tinkers to do. They adapted other parahuman powers into their gear in some way.
The detail of how fast it could do and how strong the armor under it without that effect up required her to see more of it in use.
What had caused her to scream, was her power reporting that said items were self-regenerating to the point that even if the Simurgh wanted to destroy or even alter them, she couldn't, anymore she could destroy the concept of gravity. Sure she could bend it for a while, but unless she kept bending it the very universe would snap back to how it had been before.
Much like her gear. She had made them so solid that they had become as fundamental to the universe as gravity itself. Outright removing them from the universe wouldn't even get rid of them as they just reappear a few days later.
It would take outright destruction of reality itself to destroy them as well.
When her power cited that this tinker's gear couldn't be harmed by two different Endbringers, it was quite clear that the Undersides would want nothing to do with her.
As much as Coil would be angry that she wasn't calling him right now from this discovery alone, Lisa knew that if she did, her orders would be to recruit the girl. A girl with serious heroic tendencies, that was looking into joining the ward, but hadn't because of bad experiences with authority, and wanted to make sure they were safe first.
Lisa didn't care what Coil would do to her for a delay, it couldn't be anything worse than setting a heroic cape with gear better suited to Endbringer fights, whom gear apparently became universal constants as she made them, then street crime on her and her team.
Lisa knew she feel safer if Coil tasked them to go after some member of the Triumvirate for their next job.
Still, considering how much the girl wanted to be a hero…
Perhaps, she could point her at Coil somehow? See how good his safety timelines are when they interacted around a cape that has gear that are literal constants of the universe that Endbringers could destroy for good.
Lisa's thoughts turned very carefully to how she might do such, and how much she might be able to leave that little nugget off from coil's report which she would certainly need to delay to the last minute now. If only for the time to plan what to tell him.
She knew that it would be a timeline she be tortured in to verify it if he had any doubt to it, but so long as she was willing to take something to her grave, he couldn't extract it from her.
Not getting someone with gear that would fit in with the Triumvirate mad at her certainly counted.
"What the Fuck?" Lisa outright screamed the next day as wasn't sure if she should trust what her power was telling her about this new cape's gear with how freely it was telling her things.
Normally she could only get the tiniest hints of what something would do until it was used. Even telling something was tinker tech was hard unless she noticed it acting differently in some way.
She had been expecting many long hours of looking over every recording of this new cape she could find by breaking into various systems around the city to get the barest ideas of what it could do.
But on the very first one, her power decided that she wasn't going to need to do that. As soon as she saw the cape on a security camera, rather than hints that her armor was power arm, it started listing out details like she had spent months studying it in detail. Information that she couldn't possibly draw on from what she knew. Information she wasn't sure if all of Watchdog at the PRT had spent a week with her gear, with outright willing endbringers to help test things and likely Scion they couldn't get this much.
How did you prove if thrown out of reality would return within 2 days anyway? Was there some hole in reality she needed to watch out for that people tested such a thing on?
Details that went from worrying to puzzlement to outright confusion and disbelief that couldn't possibly be true.
And every time she tried to think that this was some sort of anti-thinker gear that the cape might used to trick her, her power kept going at her, no it was true. All of this was true.
Assuming she treated her power as not wrong and lying to start with. Some items were concerning to her, such as the fact that the sword was sharp enough to cut bitch's dog like they were made of water was worrying, and would have caused Lisa to think this new cape was in clear need of a lesson in the underwritten rules.
Which her power had helpfully informed her she had gotten the first night as well. She had ZERO data to build this conclusion on. It should have been so blindly inaccurate that it should have been worthless. But she knew who had told her and more or less what they had said.
The armor having a similar feature to Glory Girl's shield, more than enough to withstand a hit from Behemoth, should have required her either watch said cape get hit by such, or something near that. Not just its interactions from standing outside around a hospital.
The only thing she was missing was the fact that there was no known charge time yet, such a thing should have come up way sooner than all the rest.
And then she moved into the insane levels. Which besides her power either deciding to suddenly just give her all the answers with no effort, was her power reporting that said her gear was self-regenerating to the point that even if the Simurgh wanted to destroy or even alter them, she couldn't, anymore she could destroy the concept of gravity. Sure she could bend it for a while, but unless she kept bending it the very universe would snap back to how it had been before.
It would take outright destruction of reality itself to destroy them as well.
How did her power even know that? How could she draw such a conclusion from what she saw?
The only sane answer had her power kept hitting back with the same thing. It not some anti-thinker device. Her gear really is that good.
Lisa slapped her hand over her face, as she tried to calm down and think, not wanting to have her power continue to feed her information that it couldn't know. Trying very hard to not think about the fact that any thoughts it was fake was meet with increasingly insistent it not.
Either this cape could alter the fundamental laws of reality to the point that Endbringers would basically be as harmless as a kitten, given she could apparently make things that became universal constants.
Or…
Lisa had to stop at the or part as her power reminded her this cape could do that.
A hypothetical cape that wasn't the one she was looking at could alter the fundamental rules of reality, or they had designed and deployed some anti-thinker device.
Lisa blinked at the feeling of amusement that came from her power. It never had been like that before.
She tried to turn her power on herself then suddenly tried to recall where she was as something was cut.
Blinking she recalled her last thoughts.
A hypothetical cape that wasn't the one she was looking at could alter the fundamental rules of reality, or they had designed and deployed some anti-thinker device.
Answer A was basically impossible, so clearly answer B.
This should have been enough to call Coil now, since something was up with her ability to read this girl… but she didn't want to.
Telling this to Coil now, would mean doing nothing but research her under his gaze. But if she kept looking for how she did she, Lisa could find the device in question that was distracting her and work around it.
Somehow.
There is no way this was all correct, and she would find out the truth. If this cape thought she could trick her with some tinker tech device, she had another thing coming.
0o0
Unknown to Taylor, a new recording she could watch appeared at her Kiosk
0o0
End of Interlude 01
0o0
Chapter 2 perks earned
2.4.1 Windows
3.1.5 Scanner (Iji)
1.4.3 Strategic Mastery II
3.6.6 Profession: Tailoring (Zen Master) (World of Warcraft)
1.2.4 Mental Resistance II
1.2.4 Mental Resistance III
1.3.6 Corruption Resistance
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Okay, what?
Did you just wank the fuck out of Lisa? How'd she get these details? Her power is INTUITION, it can't look at something and say, "It can survive Behemoth"
It never can unless, well, it survives impacts similar to Behemoth.
Did you just wank the fuck out of Lisa? How'd she get these details? Her power is INTUITION, it can't look at something and say, "It can survive Behemoth"
It never can unless, well, it survives impacts similar to Behemoth.
- Location
- Earth
MC had some lucky rolls there, some unlucky ones too.
The nervous system is part of the mind so I wager regents power will no longer work on MC.
I am surprised Lisa knows about the timeline, is it AU or do I just have wrong fanon assumptions.
MC got teir 3 mental resistance which means she is immune to insanely, mesmic hazards and more importantly anything that would impact how her mind works, which is a broad broad umbrella. Probably even covers drugs too which is something to think about, coffee and tea are technically mind effecting and change how your mind works.
Lisa's power seems massively boosted though may be the shard loosening a little and helping Lisa by giving her more info that she would have gotten normally as the armor is extremely interesting to shards.
The video recording at the end could be a more useful tape of the encounter which would be nice. Or it could be the interlude stuff. Or maybe even alternate timeline from coil as that could still count as MC and the simulation cancelling couldn't stop the terminal from recording it. Getting coil timelines on MCs terminal would definitely set a fire under MCs ass.
MC made a mistake by ignoring the undead power she didn't know it's use, maybe she could use small animals as scouting minions or get animal undead. It didn't necessarily have to be Human. Such a moral compass is pretty annoying.
Flying carpet and a ranged weapon could be really helpful, a lot of Cape powers are useless against a flying opponent.
I wonder if MC can make a invisibility cloak with that tailoring perk.
Corruption resistance seems pretty much useless in this world but still nice to have just in case.
She should really take some time to detail out her plans backups and contingency so that get strategy perk can trigger. It's also a learning booster of
10x so she would read up on PTR doctrines some tactics and planning books wouldn't be bad either.
MC should also remember she can take apart get scanner to see how her other perks interact with that as it will repair in one day.
Do words from interludes count towards charges? I hope they do, MC will need it.
Thanks for the chapter, look forward to more!
The nervous system is part of the mind so I wager regents power will no longer work on MC.
I am surprised Lisa knows about the timeline, is it AU or do I just have wrong fanon assumptions.
MC got teir 3 mental resistance which means she is immune to insanely, mesmic hazards and more importantly anything that would impact how her mind works, which is a broad broad umbrella. Probably even covers drugs too which is something to think about, coffee and tea are technically mind effecting and change how your mind works.
Lisa's power seems massively boosted though may be the shard loosening a little and helping Lisa by giving her more info that she would have gotten normally as the armor is extremely interesting to shards.
The video recording at the end could be a more useful tape of the encounter which would be nice. Or it could be the interlude stuff. Or maybe even alternate timeline from coil as that could still count as MC and the simulation cancelling couldn't stop the terminal from recording it. Getting coil timelines on MCs terminal would definitely set a fire under MCs ass.
MC made a mistake by ignoring the undead power she didn't know it's use, maybe she could use small animals as scouting minions or get animal undead. It didn't necessarily have to be Human. Such a moral compass is pretty annoying.
Flying carpet and a ranged weapon could be really helpful, a lot of Cape powers are useless against a flying opponent.
I wonder if MC can make a invisibility cloak with that tailoring perk.
Corruption resistance seems pretty much useless in this world but still nice to have just in case.
She should really take some time to detail out her plans backups and contingency so that get strategy perk can trigger. It's also a learning booster of
10x so she would read up on PTR doctrines some tactics and planning books wouldn't be bad either.
MC should also remember she can take apart get scanner to see how her other perks interact with that as it will repair in one day.
Do words from interludes count towards charges? I hope they do, MC will need it.
Thanks for the chapter, look forward to more!
Last edited: