H+ Mayhem (Worm)

Jurric · Mar 11, 2016

In which Cricket gets a laser scythe, Sveta gets motorized, and Burnscar gets a beard.

It's quite serious. I promise.

I have been told, (and I agree,) that this story does not start off very well, but picks up and becomes quite good once you get started. I would like to go back and re-write the beginning, but I think I'll go ahead and write the end first. Please persevere for a while, and you might find yourself enjoying it.

Index
Human
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.M

Transition
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.T

Inhuman
3.M.1
3.A
3.M.2
3.M.3
3.1
3.S
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.S.2
3.M.4
3.5
3.6
3.F.1
3.F.2
3.F.3
3.7
3.8
3.9
3.10

Monster
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.S
4.5
4.C
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.9
4.10
4.11
4.M.1
4.M.2

Kaijū
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.T.1
5.4
5.D
5.5
5.T.2
5.T.3
5.E
5.6
5.7
5.L

Transhuman
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.S
6.6
6.I
6.7

Omakes
Too Stupid To Die
Mixed Feelings
Regent Omake
Cranial Omake
An Inevitable Conflict
Thanks, Jack!
Just as... Planned?

Jurric · Mar 11, 2016

I decided that the first test of my jetpack would be flying into the PRT building. Normally that would be stupid, untested tech plus a public appearance was a horrible idea, but I wanted to impress, and I had tested my mask thoroughly, it should warn me if anything catastrophic was going to happen.

The jetpack worked admirably, especially when combined with the rocket boots. It wasn't a normal jetpack, it was a design I stole from a star wars MMO, although I intended to modify it further eventually. The jetpack consisted of thick, wraparound chest armor, which contained the generator, and four extendable limbs connected to the back of the chest armor, which I could control with my spinal implant in much the same way as I manipulated my own limbs. At the moment these extendable limbs could only release a steady stream of kinetic propulsion, but I already had the designs to rework that into a long range kinetic blast written up in my lab. The trick was to keep the energy as light until it impacted a solid object, much like Kid Win's pistols did.

I flared the jetpack's 'legs' and my own rocket boots to land softly. The right rocket boot gave a slight whistle, and I winced. I blew out the power supply in it again. I'd known I hadn't exactly been working with the right equipment when I made them, but I had hoped it would last longer than that.

The PRT response was quite efficient. The guards with containment foam snapped to attention, scanning me for weapons. Several even homed in on the small handle on my belt as a weapon, correctly, but I held my hands up placating, and I wasn't foamed. I didn't make any threatening moves as I walked towards the reception desk, and, aside from being watched closely, I wasn't accosted.

There were three people ahead of me in the cue for the receptionists desk, what looked like a mother and their young daughter, and an elderly man in a formal suit, but all three stepped aside rapidly when they saw me. It would have been very awkward to wait in cue dressed like this, so I nodded to the three, and apologized.

"Sorry, I'll try to make this quick." I said.

The receptionist had pressed something under their desk when they saw me, but she still turned to me with a smile.

"How can I help you sir?" She asked politely.

"I'd like to see the director. To make an appointment if she isn't available." I said.

"Please wait while I check." The assistant, who's name tag proudly proclaimed her to be Mandy, said.

I rocked back on my heels slightly. It wouldn't be easy fixing the casing for my rocket boots. Unlike my jetpack, I had already retooled those for bursts of kinetic energy, just in case I needed to jump away from something really fast, and didn't mind the inevitable destruction of my legs. Honestly the jetpack was mostly inspired when I saw the damage of a directed kinetic pulse. I had not fully thought that through when I was designing the things.

I clicked my heels together, and was greeted with a slight rattle. The problem with rigging a micro-reactor like mine to produce energy in both short bursts and steady streams was two fold. First, rigging the containment to breach in a way that didn't cause an explosion, and second, rigging the containment not to breach at all. I hadn't actually solved that second one. I had ideas, but I needed better tools. I could make them, but I needed raw materials. However my reactors actually worked they didn't need uranium or anything, gold, silver, a bit of copper, a lot of tin, barium, potassium… not the final product of course, but I could get the raw materials, refine them into what I needed, if I had money.

… and I was mentally waffling.

At least my powers weird need for conflict wasn't turning out to be the bottleneck I initially thought.

"Director Piggot is in a meeting at the moment, but Armsmaster is available and can come in directly from the rig, if you'd like to talk to him instead?" Mandy said, putting down the phone.

I shook my head.

"Thank you, but as much as I'd like to talk with another Tinker, I'm likely to be too star-stuck to keep a clear head, and I think I'll need one. Can you arrange an appointment for me please?"

Mandy nodded.

"If you want to come in tomorrow at eight AM, her aide says that she will be available then." She said.

"Thank you. I'll be there." I said, trying the hide my embarrassment as I turned and walked out of the lobby.

Taking off with just the jetpack wasn't hard, though my ascent was slower than I'd like. Each of the jetpack's legs was only roughly as strong as the thrusters in my boots, and the two of those had only been good for a sort of directed glide when they worked.

Still, I'd call this a success. The boot dying on me was a pain, but that was why I had multiple thrust sources now. Redundancy, and I could fix the boot with the scrap in my workshop. It would break again but, as I said, redundancy.

I stayed low, and settled into a nearby alley to let the jetpack retract back into its backpack shape. It looked about right for a school backpack, and I had stashed an actual backpack to cover the metal with in the alley. Then I regretfully unplugged my mask from my face, and winced as the world went black. Wish I could wear that all the time, but I hadn't managed to get the full sensor suite compacted into a glass eye yet. Or, more accurately, I had, but it wasn't a glass eye, it looked like something from the terminator. Obviously tinker-tech, and far to much off a give away to wear in broad daylight.

I put on a pair of dark glasses, grabbed my cane, and jogged home to stash my jetpack before I went to school.

***

I know a fair bit about capes. Naturally, you get a power, you become a bit of a cape geek. Either that or you're an idiot. I know that most capes end up villains, and I know that's because of the nature of trigger events. Me, I'm the opposite. I was all on track to be a villain, or as much as a seven year old kid can be. I preferred robber in cops and robbers. I was the monster when we played heroes and monsters. I… pulled my sisters hair… honestly, a lot of stuff from back then was pretty vague, but I was a rather typical kid, with a mild case of ADHD. Probably not actual ADHD, my parents were thinking of taking me to the doctors to be checked, but yeah… I was a small nightmare. Unlike my sister.

I didn't really want to think about my sister.

My past pushed me to try and become a hero out of spite, but Taylor's past was very different. I have no idea how she managed to hold herself together. I'd felt Taylor trigger three weeks ago, and I was waiting for one of two things. The arrest of the girls who pushed her into that locker, or for Taylor to go all Carrie on the school with whatever power she just received.

It was only a guess that she triggered, but it was one I was fairly confident in, I'd read about it, browsing some of the more serious forums on PHO, I had already know that a trigger event causes a short, temporary blackout to all nearby parahumans, and my neural implant registered some weird brain activity at that time. It fit, but Taylor just went about her day, as brutally bullied as she always was. Hacking the school computers would have been childsplay even if I wasn't a Tinker. The information wasn't actually stored on those computers, but I was eventually able to dig up a deleted email between Blackwell and Sophia's case worker that explained why the girls hadn't been arrested, or punished at all.

I was fairly sure Piggot didn't know. I'd read about her, she might cover this up, but she wouldn't let it continue the way it was. If I was wrong… well, we'd cross that bridge when we got to it.

I hadn't really been interested in Taylor until after I felt the trigger. I'd paid more attention to the gang members, and tried to figure out who would be down for a fight, but wouldn't actually go too far. The… energy I needed to unlock new things to Tinker came more quickly if I'd been in a fight, but I couldn't really make a new jetpack if my fingers were broken and I was vomiting blood, so I needed to compromise. Someone who was willing to hit the blind kid, but who wouldn't put him in the hospital. A tricky balancing act.

Still, I was paying attention to Taylor now. She'd only come back from the hospital a week ago, and I was slowly working myself into her good graces. Being blind helped, I just asked her to show me the way to a few classes, and it was a good excuse for not helping her earlier. Because you did have to be blind not to notice what Taylor went though. I didn't see any need to tell her I had heard she was in the locker, and done nothing, that would probably hurt her, and I like to think I would have done something, if I had all the details. Hearing a few other students mention in passing that a girl had been shoved into a locker just hadn't registered as important to me.

Taylor always approaches the lunch table like a small, frightened animal. I can tell by the way the chair beneath her creaked, she doesn't put her full weight on it, ready to flee at the first sign of her tormentors. It had taken me three days just to convince her that the lunchroom was safe, and… that had probably been a lie. In the end she decided to come because I had several assignments that hadn't been properly converted to braille, and she volunteered to help me with them. It was annoying, asking for help, but Taylor provided it readily enough, and I had been worried that my excuse of 'help at home' wouldn't cover using my mask to read the instruction sheets normally.

"Um. How was art?" Taylor asked, her weight eventually settling on the chair.

"Not to bad. I started working with slip casts. They should come out quite nicely." I told her, then I grinned. "Much more fun to be working practically, don't you think?"

"Um. Yeah. Do you need help with the theory assignment?"

I shook my head, something I took care to keep up since I lost my sight. Just because I can't benefit fully from body language doesn't mean everyone else can't, and I didn't plan on being blind permanently.

"It's fine. Mr Wilson knows how to use the school's braille printer." I told her.

I'd been trying to figure out Taylor's power for a while now. I was leaning towards Tinker, like me. I'd asked to borrow her mobile once, and she said she didn't have one. I cannibalized my own phones for parts almost as quickly as I bought them, so maybe that was a thing for Tinkers. Just for the last day or so, she'd been able to almost uncannily avoid some of her more determined tormentors, which seemed to lend credence to my theory. I think I remembered someone commenting that she wore glasses, it wouldn't be too hard for me to hack the school security cameras and send a feed to a pair of glasses. Perhaps she was doing the same.

No, wait, someone else had told me that the last of the Winslow cameras had been vandalized over a year ago, and all of them were non-functional. Note to self, check if they had been repaired.

"Right, um, I'd better be going then. I'll see you tomorrow morning." Taylor said, getting up just a fraction too quickly.

So, someone was coming. Oh well, not like I was particularly bothered by it. If all went well with my meeting with Piggot tomorrow morning, this would be over by Wednesday.

Taylor left, and it didn't take long for me to notice three footsteps idling towards me.

"I don't know why you hang out with that looser." A voice said. It took me a couple of seconds to place it as Emma.

"I do." I said, smiling. Lunch was almost finished, and I considered this problem nearly solved. If Piggot still covered for Sophia I'd probably be in for a bad week or two, but I was fairly sure that all three of them would be gone soon. Perhaps I should avoid coming to school tomorrow, just in case… no, this counted as conflict for my power. A fight that slowly built the energy I could then invest into further designs. Just because I was bottle-necked at the production end just now didn't mean I didn't want more potential tech.

Emma waited for an explanation before exploding into a sigh.

"She's ugly as sin you know, and if you do get into her pants, you're just going to catch whatever she has."

I shrugged.

"Good thing that isn't my reason for hanging around her then." I said simply.

"You're not going to make any friends, hanging around with her." Sophia tried.

Ah, poor Sophia, can't punch the blind man in a crowded cafeteria, and thus attempting a social attack. Stick to punching people Sophia. It's your only strength.

Still, this was as good an opportunity as any to buy Taylor and myself a bit of a reprieve, just in case the inevitable investigation took a while to happen.

It used to be I couldn't even think of doing this. Used to be, I'd get a panic attack at anything even slightly related to that day. I'd fixed that. The first thing my neural implant did was dampen and suppress the fear response, not completely, and only in response to a sharp spike of fear, but I'd modified it since, both to interface with the spinal implant and to kept me calm and rational. I was still tweaking the program, trying to ensure that it still let me feel emotions, adjusting which emotions I felt, and to what degree. I didn't want to become a sociopath, and I think I'd found a pleasant sweet-spot I dubbed the 'action hero zone.'

Perhaps the fear response was a bit low, but I had my spinal implant set up to inject adrenaline on command, and that was what fear was for, really, to trigger the fight or flight responses at full throttle. I could do that manually. In fact I was working on synthesizing something better than adrenaline, something that would let me drastically improve mental processing speed. I called it SlowMo. Hopefully it would work more reliably than activating the Mayhem protocol.

I pulled myself back from the whirling chemical formula in my head, and focused on the girls around me. This wasn't the time to tinker.

"Sophia, that sounded almost like a threat." I said, trying to fake being aghast.

"Not a threat, just some friendly advice. Taylor is bad news." Sophia said.

"I see." I said, taking off my glasses, and showing them the holes where my eyes used to be. "Or, as the case may be, I don't. Thank you for your… advice. But I will not be following it. You see, when I was ten years old, Jack Slash cut out my eyes. Did it himself, took his time, as the corpses of my mother and father cooled in the next room. After my sister gave up trying to heal us. That," I put my glasses back on, "is the standard I set for intimidation."

"Huh." Sophia said, "That's kind of badass. Why do you hang around with a wimp?"

"Before I tell you that, let me explain something to you. Before Jack blinded me, he told me that I was going to be his test. He was going to take my sister, he was going to train her, and one day, to prove just how well he had her trained, he was going to come back for me, and make her… work on me. Do you really want to hang around someone Jack Slash has promised to visit?"

"Bullshit." Sophia said. "There's no fucking way…"

Sophia was a Ward, so it should be safe to show her, and I was certain that Jack could find me anyway, if he wanted to. My sister could do it, if he couldn't. When they put me in witness protection they told me to throw that part of my life away. Get rid of everything from back then. I hadn't. I kept a picture of how our family used to be. I tried not to look at it myself, when I was capable of looking at things. Riley had grown of course, it had been five years, but she was still recognizable.

Part of me wanted them to find me, while my sister was still recognizable.

There was silence, and I really wished that I had my mask, so I could read their facial expressions.

I'd taken too long though, the bell rang, and lunch was over, so they didn't have to think up a response that let them get away without sounding scared. A shame. Still, I'd like to think that those awkward seconds of silence would haunt the girls for a while. Or nightmares of Jack Slash coming the school.

Honestly though, Jack had probably forgotten about me. It had been five years, and it wasn't like I triggered on that day. I'd gone through witness protection, been fostered off. It had been later, as the stress of his threat made me throw away relationships with anyone who came close, as my mind slowly deteriorated under a strong case of PTSD and the twin isolation of blindness and my own self-imposed isolation.

He had a very firm grip on my sister. I knew. I'd read about the things she'd done, and she would never have been able to do that as the girl I knew. He'd probably decided it was too much of a bother to hunt me, or that it would damage his hold on her, instead of reinforcing it. Or perhaps it was the threat he held over her head. 'Now now, sew the woman up nicely or I'll make you do your brother next.'

Removing my fear of his promise had freed me. I'd been a mess. I'd broken down. I wasn't able to help. Wasn't able to be the big brother I should have been, but my trigger fixed all that, at least in part. Seven weeks to get enough energy for the schematics I needed, two weeks to build something I dubbed the 'Surgery Box.' One week to design and program an interface port into my skull…

My power had stopped coming as quickly once I settled my brain chemistry. It took longer to climb the 'Aviation' tree than it did the 'Human Augmentation' tree, and I didn't remember having trouble singling out the 'Neural Enhancements' branch of Human Augmentation like I did for the 'Kinetic Propulsion' branch of the Aviation tree.

Didn't matter. I wasn't ever going back to being that nervous wreck.

Jurric · Mar 12, 2016

Afternoon classes went quickly. I didn't pay a lot of attention. History, English. Didn't need either of them. Hell, I could probably become a History Tinker or Language Tinker if I wanted, and get all this information for free from my power.

I queried my power, and yes, those were sort of options. I could build a postcog machine. It was in the 'Surveillance' tree, under the 'Investigative' branch. As for English, that was in there as well, under the 'Social' tree. It seemed to be a very basic core component of the tree, with the ability to create translation software being non-specific to any one branch.

I sighed as our homework was handed out, and trailed my fingers over the assignment. Still, I hadn't bought anything from either of those trees yet, and breaking into a new tree was very expensive. I had to buy up most of the 'root' stuff, basic skills, reflexes, knowledge my power took for granted in the later blueprints. Suppose I'd better at least try to get passing marks.

I met Taylor briefly at the bus stop. She just said hello, and then got onto her bus. I got onto mine, and got off on the third stop.

This was Winslow, even the bus drivers were bad. It took me ten minutes of feeling subtle wrongness, before I figured out that I'd been let off at the wrong stop. An easy mistake to make, it had even happened before once, probably some student asking to get off early to meet with a friend somewhere, or a dog going across the road. Something that made me loose count. Normally I kept track of the turns as well, and knew where to get off. Or the bus driver would warn me. Today I'd been lost in some of my designs, and the bus driver hadn't been paying attention.

Still, this had happened before, last time I had to ask strangers the route back, but I think I remembered it now. Should be able to find my way home.

It took me a good hour to find the notched fence that bordered my property, but I did find it, opened the gate, made my way down the path, unlocked the door, checked my alarm, and then made myself a pre-tinkering snack.

I was alone in the house, as I was most days. The foster system wasn't really built for Slaughterhouse victims, and I'd been doing this… thing where the guilt of endangering my family drove me to tell them about Jack's promise. That was a very quick path to being shoved back into the system.

In the end the PRT had found a family with a fair bit of money, and a small, cheap second house near the docks that they didn't use very often. By that point I was a teenager, so they gave me the keys, and my foster father, Mark, dropped around every few days to make sure I was all right, make sure that I was keeping the place tidy, that sort of thing. I had a personal alarm, that was about as safe as they could make me on a government benefits budget.

It took a bit of bargaining to keep Mark out of my room permanently. Not sure what he thought I was doing in there, I'd tried to imply that I was embarrassed about a few sculptures, and I took pains to make sure that there weren't signs I was sleeping on the couch when he came around.

I had to sleep on the couch, because I'd used the frame of my bed to hold a diagnostic scanner. If that didn't tip him off I think the new wooden bench that wrapped around the room would do the trick, laden as it was with various tools and gadgets. I hadn't managed to build any truly amazing tools yet, but I don't think a regular fifteen year old needs a miniature electron microscope.

I had a box of scrap in the corner, mostly old computers and printers scavenged from the dump, along with a few radios and half a car engine. My task for this evening was stripping the gold off everything in the box with certain chemicals, then separating out the silicon and some of the smaller chips and transistors. I'd scrapped my computer over the weekend for jetpack parts, and I needed to build another one before I could do much else. I'd need to program the micro-forge if I wanted to create a new power supply, and I didn't have an interface to do that right now. Also, I'd need a computer to get my homework done, though I had till Friday to do that.

Before doing anything else I put my mask on. The smooth fabric covering was designed not to look technological, a little misdirection, just to keep people guessing. On the interior, of course, it was different.

There was a small plug on the back of my head, sunk into my flesh and covered in fake hair. I gave it a half twist, pulled it out, and pushed the connection at the back of the mask into the small port in my skull. Then I pulled the front of the mask out, over my head, and slipped the twin globes on the front into my eye sockets, to better hold the mask in place and to provide the processing power for the sensor suite inside the mask.

The mask didn't cover my whole face, just a wide, white strip around my eyes, upper nose, and over my eyebrows. The mask was pretty decent, one of the few pieces of tinkertech I bought specific components for, blowing nearly a year's savings to give myself sight. It could see a fair distance into both the infrared and ultraviolet, but my visual cortex wasn't adapted to that information yet. I was still getting a mild headache from the way my vision now wrapped around my skull, so I restricted the mask to the visible spectrum for now. Later, once I'd adjusted, I'd gradually dial it up until I could see through walls, watch someone's temperature rise or fall, see ultravoilet radiation, watch electrical signals travel through the atmosphere…

The interface port at the back of my skull was designed to let me alter my brain as much as possible without having to go through invasive surgery again. The interior of my skull was lined with small, adaptable sensors and emitters, allowing me to brain-computer interface in almost any way I could imagine. For example, the mask interfaced directly with my visual cortex. It wasn't perfect, I'd been blind for a long time, my brain had started to re-purpose my visual cortex to processing other sensory data. I got weird flashes sometimes, when I wore the mask, feeling odd sensations, smells or sounds that I could feel weren't real, just a false signal from the mask.

I didn't care. With this on, I could see. I could read and write in a notebook without having to trace my fingers over tiny bumps. I didn't need to prick my fingers on electronics to tell what they were. I didn't need to walk slowly and carefully everywhere. Didn't need to make a mental note of where I put everything down… all the little things you take for granted when your eyes are functioning.

Perhaps it would be different if I was blind from birth, but my eyes were taken from me. Stolen. I wanted them back, and now I had… something. That alone, would have been enough to calm me significantly.

At the time I had seven active, working pieces of tinkertech that weren't just tools. My mask, a pair of terminator eyes that can interface with my neural chip directly, but don't have wraparound vision, my neural chip, my spinal chip, my rocket boots, my jetpack, and my lightsabre. Not bad for nearly six months of work, though I was hoping to do better in future.

The lightsabre had been the big mistake. My power allows me spend the energy I gather to buy blueprints from anywhere in a tech tree, they were just much, much cheaper in a tree that I had already unlocked, or if I had other, related technology.

The lightsabre was taken directly from the 'Weapons' tech tree, inside the 'Disintegration Weapons' branch, and in itself was all kinds of awesome. I was a big Star Wars fan in my youth, and it was cool to think that I could actually make something like that. The trouble was, when I bought the blueprint with my power, I didn't have the tools to make it. I needed to buy the blueprints to make the tools as well, and then I needed to buy the skills to make the tools, instinctive knowledge of how to move my hands with the ultra-precision necessary to create such impressive technology. It ended up being almost as expensive as buying my way up the Weapons tree would have been, and I still couldn't modify, enhance, or redesign the lightsabre without investing significantly more energy into it, because I hadn't bought the more 'basic' aspects of weapons tinkering and object disintegration tinkering. I couldn't even power the lightsabre for long, the batteries lasted for a couple of seconds each, and buying the proper power source would set me back about three weeks of energy, depending on how many fights I got into.

I was hoping that eventually I'd get some sort of comparable cross technology. It wasn't too far fetched. I could make other power sources, for my jetpack and my boots, and while they weren't compatible with the lightsabre yet, they could be one day, once I learned to adapt them. I'd already proven that the 'Kinetic Propulsion' branch of the Aviation skill tree 'linked up' with the 'Kinetic Weapons' branch of the 'Weapons' skill tree, and I could follow that link to make kinetic weapons, instead of buying my way up an entirely separate tree.

By now, stripping electronics for useful resources and parts had become mostly rote. I could do it in my sleep if there wasn't so much acid involved. Building a computer wasn't hard either. Apparently my power considered that basic enough not to even put it into a tree. Just something that any tinker could do, given a bit of time and the right resources.

My careful scrubbing of circuit boards was interrupted by someone ringing the doorbell, and I regretfully took my mask off, and made myself presentable. There was a buzzer connected to the porch light, so I knew that the porch was empty by the time I got there, and I felt around on the ground for the inevitable parcel. Hopefully a delivery of the cheap electronics I ordered off E-bay, though I couldn't remember anything that was scheduled to arrive today.

I grabbed the parcel and took it back inside, then put on my mask to inspect it.

The parcel wasn't quite what I was expecting. It contained cash - two thousand dollars - and a small card with raised lettering.

If you are not interested in joining the Protectorate, there are other options. The card stated simply, then it had a number and a small symbol of intertwined snakes.

I memorized the number, caught the edge of the card with my Bunsen burner, and blew the ash into a plastic bag, which I put in the bin. Then I hid the cash in the hallway closet. I'd use it tomorrow.

It had, of course, only been a matter of time before someone found out my civilian identity. I'd been getting less and less cautious of late, buying chemicals that I probably couldn't justify for household cleaning, electronics in bulk, that sort of thing. Hopefully one of the gangs wouldn't try to recruit me. If they did… don't know, honestly. I wasn't sure the E88 would go for it. My great grandfather was African American, and while I was barely dark enough for it to be visible, I wasn't exactly 'pure.' I wasn't Asian, and the Merchants… well if the Merchants tried to take me I think I could run.

The only reason I'd been so cautious up till now was that I didn't want Jack to know where I was, not until I was ready, and I was ready now.

You see, the containment for the reactors in my shoes doesn't have to breach safely.

Jurric · Mar 13, 2016

I stayed up later than I should have fixing my rocket boot and building a computer. Once it was up and active I ordered the materials I needed for some high grade tools. When they arrived I'd be able to upgrade the jetpack for offensive weaponry. It emptied the bank account, but I'd put the cash in tomorrow. Claim I got it babysitting or something if the bank asked.

Perhaps I could add some more features to my implants as well. I already had the ingredients for some SlowMo, just needed a way to inject it properly. It would be most effective if applied directly to the brain, so some sort of containment unit in my skull would be a good idea…

I really shouldn't have made myself a mobile phone while I was at it, not considering how late it got. I made it to wirelessly interface with my neural implant, for on the fly adjustments to my mental state, and so I could program in some extra features. I'd need to add some targeting software to both implants before I could reliably aim the legs of my jetpack…

It was four AM when I went to sleep, and I needed to get up at seven to get to the PRT building at eight. My alarm woke me, and I put on my mask before wandering into the kitchen and making myself a breakfast of two minute noodles.

My power suggested healthier things; things at the root of the Human Augmentation tree. All basic health care, foods I could make to boost my metabolism and build musculature, that sort of thing. I ignored it. A little further up the Human Augmentation tree was full body replacement, I hadn't reached it yet, but one day I'd be building a bionic body from scratch, then making a full brain transplant. I didn't have access to the blueprints yet, just the vague descriptions my power gave when I looked further up the trees, but I was already drooling over the concept. I'd never been particularly attached to the body I had, and considering the 'infiltration' tag on the description, I think the bionic body had perfectly normal looking eyes. Hopefully it was also anatomically accurate, but, honestly, there were things I was willing to give up.

The noodles gurgled in an otherwise empty stomach, making me realize I missed dinner last night as I strapped on the jetpack.

Interestingly, I was starting to get ideas on how to combine my two tech trees, even if they hadn't linked into each other. Ways to internalize the jetpack's components, ways to run the kinetic pulses down my arms. The ideas weren't the crystal clarity of a blueprint I had bought, or the vague description of a blueprint further up the tree. I think it was what a normal tinker might have. Inspiration, lost if it wasn't acted on. Things I could probably make if I worked at it, but I'd need to fill certain gaps with my own, woeful, scientific knowledge. Or improvise in ways that I wouldn't fully understand.

I'd have to try it later, once I had enough materials to waste some. Or never. I'd made plans before, of how to build myself what I would need to fight the Nine. I always stumbled on something new. Despite six months planning I still hadn't been able to explore my tech trees. The knowledge of what they contained faded rapidly if I wasn't looking at them, even the descriptions would leave my mind if I didn't focus on them. I had the knowledge I'd unlocked, a general idea of what was next, the ability to glance ahead to judge where to stick my points, and that was about it.

Flying to the PRT office wasn't an issue, and this time they had an officer waiting downstairs for me. I was escorted upstairs to the directors office, and only had to wait a few minutes before the director called me in.

I'd seen the director before. Read about her. I'd looked up information on the Wards quite carefully. I'd even managed to make a friendly pen-pal out of Kid Win on PHO. I think he suspected I was a tinker. We mostly talked about tech, and while I kept the topics off any trees I had invested in… tinkers have some fairly predictable conversation tendencies. Still, he didn't know what state I was in, so my anonymity was all but guaranteed, and he'd provided some valuable insights into how tech was classified as 'safe' by the PRT.

In other words, there was no way in hell I was ever submitting any of my tech for review. I knew it was safe, my power assured me of that, but they'd never let me stick stuff into my head unless they tested it first. I didn't have the time for that, and their forms of testing wouldn't work either. Animal testing was out. It was Human Augmentation, not Animal Augmentation… though that wasn't too far off, and some of the branches connected, it wouldn't be hard to make some cyborg guard dogs…

Piggot was seated at her desk, and Armsmaster was standing in the corner of the room when I entered.

Blast. I hadn't been kidding about having a serious case of hero worship. Armsmaster was only a Ward when the Slaughterhouse was last in the Bay, but he was given partial credit for the death of Chuckles, when the Slaughterhouse was eventually driven out. It was like having Dragon herself standing in the corner, staring at me.

I'd told that to the receptionist last time. There was no way it didn't get passed up the chain. They'd maneuvered for advantage. Fortunately, I could fix that. I took out my phone, isolated the neural connections related to excitement and respect, and dampened them.

Mental note, keep up a respectful act anyway. It wouldn't pay to antagonize the PRT, and I still had logic. Just think about everything from a logical standpoint, don't act on the sudden void of emotions. Channel Spock.

"Sudden inspiration?" Armsmaster asked.

"A few tweaks to my programming, sorry about the delay." I told him. He nodded, his eyes roaming over my tech, as my own mask's sensors locked onto his.

I didn't have the specialties I needed to really get a good idea of his armor, but I could pick up bits and pieces of it's function. There were small rams in his boots, designed to throw him a fair distance if directed into the ground, and the suit would lock up to disperse the force over his whole body. I should do something like that with my own rocket boots, I'd already planned to replace my legs, some sort of pre-programmed lock after a certain amount of kinetic energy was registered, flexible internal bracing, and a shock absorbent mount onto a restructured pelvis…

"Your implanted technology is much more advanced than the tech you're wearing." Armsmaster said.

Of course it was, I'd gone a fair distance up the Human Augmentation tree, but I was only just past strapping a glider to my back in the Aviation tree. It was why the boots and the jetpack still failed fairly often, I was overreaching, trying to climb higher than I was really ready for. I'd unlocked blueprints in a straight line up, without the sort of… supporting framework that the lower blueprints and skills provided.

"Well yeah, I wanted to be sure anything I stuck in my body worked." I told Armsmaster. "That's not really the issue though, I don't want to go into my power at the moment. It isn't what I'm here for."

"It is an issue. Do you know your specialty?" Armsmaster asked.

Blunt, but that was something I liked about him. He cut through the bullshit. If I thought he could do that for me, help me actually tinker what I needed without the PRT's stupid rules, I'd sign right up. He didn't do it for Kid Win though, probably couldn't, the Wards were always held to a different standard. After all, it wasn't like the government would ever trust anyone under the age of eighteen with super-weapons, even if they were the ones who made them.

"Human Augmentation." I admitted. It was the field I had the most energy invested in right now, and that wasn't likely to change. It was a good field. It covered offense, defense, was the closest thing I had to a medical specialty…

If Jack was slow enough in turning up I might even be able to save my sister with it. Probably not. Dangerous to try. I'd figured long ago that the closest I'd get to saving her would be a hug while my reactors went critical.

I turned to face Piggot. She'd been saying something. Let's see, rewind the last few seconds from my mask…

"I sort of have a name, yeah." I told her. "I don't think H+ is taken."

Piggot looked at Armsmaster.

"H+ is the symbol for the conceptual opposite of an electron, also the symbol for a hydron, a cationic form of atomic hydrogen, and the symbol for the transhuman movement, a small group of people who feel humanity should work to improve the human condition through wide availability of sophisticated technologies to enhance intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, in order to overcome physical limitations."

"It's the third one. In case you couldn't guess." I told them. I could still feel embarrassment. Easy to fix though. I took out my phone and started tapping.

"The transhuman movement has no popular support at the moment, due to tinkertech not being replicable, and the widespread and dominant nature of parahumans. The destructive impact of parahumans on society has lead to the belief that transhumans would only make the situation worse." Armsmaster continued.

I sighed. It was… something that probably wouldn't happen. A dream, for if everything went perfectly. It would be years before I had the sort of tech to back up that name, and I didn't expect to get years, but I did have some impressive blueprints further up the tree. A fully automated surgery with a weak AI running the whole thing was a blueprint I planned to get eventually, when I had the energy for it, but even then, I'd need to build the surgery myself, and maintain it. Much higher than that, year and years of energy away, was the really exciting stuff. Self replicating nano-tech. Strong AI. Entire factories for the production of posthuman technologies…

Fucking Simurgh would probably get to me first. Better to just take out the squishier members of the Nine with a suicide bomb. That would be a good way to go. Still, Jack wouldn't get near if he knew that was the plan. May as well at least keep up the pretense of hope for the future.

"Still, I like the idea, and I think it's a cool name." I told Piggot. She didn't smile, in fact her lips became a thin line, but that seemed to be her default state.

"Very well then H+, you wanted to meet me, what would you like to see me about?"

"About a week ago, I hacked into the Winslow Public School computer system. I only looked at a few documents, and I sent them an anonymous email later, telling them how to patch their security leak, but I was… curious about something, so when I noticed one particular email, I opened it. Here is a printout."

My jetpack had a small storage compartment, between the pack itself and my back. I took a few sheets of paper out of it, and handed it to Piggot, she took them, scanned them, and scowled. It was pretty damning. Sophia's case worker was quite plainly asking Blackwell to cover the whole thing up. Piggot should have access to police and hospital reports, and I didn't want her to know that I hacked those systems as well, so… that should be it.

Piggot read the email carefully, and I could see the blood rising in her face as she figured out what it was referring to.

"I assure you, there will be an investigation into this." Piggot said, pushing the paperwork aside. "However, this raises an issue. You now know the secret identity of a Ward, and she is still a Ward, at least until this investigation finishes."

"I assure you, I don't intend to out Sophia. I've come to you, and I'll keep quiet about this, let you deal with it in house. I just thought it was something you should know."

Piggot nodded.

"Good. I'll have some forms printed for you to sign, and we'll overlook how you came by this information."

I shook my head.

"If you want to take me to court for hacking the school computers, you can, and you have my word I won't out Shadow Stalker just for this, but I'm not giving you…" I paused, cart blank something, a legal term, how was it pronounced? "…the legal right to just sweep this all under a rug. Sorry."

Saying that was a mistake, in hindsight. I blame the lack of sleep.

"Disclosing the identity of a Ward is a crime."

"Not if the Ward has been abusing their status in their civilian identity to the point it lead to their discovery."

"Actually, parahuman law states… " Armsmaster began.

"I'm talking about the spirit of the law. Not the letter." I told him.

Piggot's eyes narrowed.

"Mr… H+, you don't seem to realize the seriousness of using a parahuman ability to enter a government system."

"I realize that a court case like that would be a nightmare for you." I told her seriously.

Piggot glared at me, but relented.

"Very well, the problem is moot so long as you become a Ward. The non-disclosure agreement is less binding, and there are procedures for whistle-blowing that you can follow should you feel the need to, though I strongly recommend that you come to me first with any concerns."

I shook my head.

"I have no desire to be a Ward. So that's also out. Sorry."

Piggot sighed, and then nodded to Armsmaster.

"Adam Truant," Armsmaster said, as if it was some huge pronunciation. "Your spending habits have been under observation for some time. A normal teenager has no need of industrial chemicals in the quantities you purchase. It's easy enough to link your physical description and school photos to your costumed identity. Your mask covers less than a third of your face. Your mask is a blindfold for goodness sake, and the Bay is hardly swarming with blind teenagers."

I shrugged.

"I know about the unwritten rules. It would be a violation of them to spread information on my civilian ID."

"If we can find this information then it's possible that other organizations could do the same. A tinker without a support framework is not going to be able to say no when one of the gangs tries to recruit you." Piggot declared, she had winced slightly at my name. Guess she remembered it. Good memory on that woman.

"I'm mixed color, and I'm not Asian. I stay well away from drugs. I should be fine." I told her.

"You are not noticeably black, and Kaiser would be willing to overlook family history for a tinker. Especially a possible biotinker. Coil is an ongoing concern, known to use tinkertech, the Merchants would not wait for you to come to them, and Lung is also… flexible in regards to his parahuman recruits. Adam. You. Are. Not. Safe." Piggot stressed.

"And that is my problem to worry about." I told her.

"You lied earlier, about your specialty. What is it really?" Armsmaster said.

I frowned. How did he know that? An examination of my gear? I guess the jetpack wasn't really human augmentation, he might be able to pick that up.

"I don't know. Human Augmentation is my best guess." I said.

"Another lie." Armsmaster said.

I back-peddled. I wasn't liking the looks of this.

"You're right, sorry. I shouldn't have lied to you. I want to conceal the exact nature of my power. I don't trust you enough to fully disclose it. Be assured, Human Augmentation is a pretty good description of how I plan to use this power, the only person I plan to modify at the moment is myself."

"And you've already done this?" Piggot asked. "You've… altered yourself in some way." She was tapping away at her computer, probably looking something up. Her eyebrows were rising.

Wonder what she was reading.

"Neural and spinal chips, designed to help me interface with my tech." I told her. "Nothing too extensive yet." No need to mention the emotion alteration. People got all confused over that sort of thing.

Armsmaster nodded to Piggot, who had gone pale.

"Adam. There is a note on your file. A recent attachment. Sophia made a query on why you were publicly telling others about your past. Why would you do that?"

Armsmaster had some way to tell if I was lying, and saying I wanted to lure the Slaughterhouse to this city would be… very bad, so…

"I'd prefer not to answer that." I told her.

"Adam. This is important. Can you create bioweapons?" Piggot asked, her eyes locked on my mask.

"I'd prefer not to answer that."

Piggot nodded politely, steeped her hands, and pressed a button under her desk with her foot. An alarm blared.

"H+. You are under arrest for using a parahuman ability to gain illegal access to government systems. Your confession will be taken into account, and you are reminded that any attempt to share the information you gained will be considered a further crime. Your legal guardian will be summoned, and if you do not have a lawyer, one will be assigned to you…"

I couldn't feel fear right now, but I could feel dejection.

"You're really doing this?" I asked her. "I tell you about an ongoing problem, I refuse to be strong-armed into the Wards, and now you try this?"

"I believe you to be a clear and present danger to this city. I will do what I have to do." Piggot told me, nodding to Armsmaster.

"Wait, wait…" I said, holding my hands up. This was… not how I thought things would go. Honestly, I didn't care about Taylor enough to go through this shit. I'd thought I could get Sophia in trouble, clear everything up, get rid of the nagging urge to leave my lab and brighten up the girl's day in one simple trip. Not this.

Still, backing down now was less of an option than I wanted it to be.

"A phone call. Let me make a phone call, and I'll go quietly." I said.

"You're lying." Armsmaster said.

I twisted, kicking at him and flaring the kinetic thrusters in my boot. It wasn't a strong pulse, weak enough not to break my ankle anyway, but it would have knocked him over if it hit. It didn't. He saw the attack coming, pushed my leg aside easily with his halberd, deflecting the pulse into the wall. He started towards me, closing the distance in two large strides.

I activated the boot I was standing on, a stronger pulse this time, strong enough I felt something in my ankle click and pop as I launched over the desk and Piggot, and activating the jetpack to steady me before I hit the floor.

Piggot's office had a large window, tinkertech glass, bulletproof according to my power. A quick slash with my lightsabre cut a round hole in it. Armsmaster was already around the desk, but I could fly, he couldn't, and we were three stories up.

Piggot grabbed one of the jetpack's four legs, pulling me back into the building. She was heavier than I could easily lift, so I drained the last second of juice in the lightsabre in a quick backwards swipe, taking that leg off the jetpack. I could fly with just three. Not well, but this was the PRT, the only fliers they had to send after me were Kid Win and Aegis, and with a little luck both of them should be on their way to school.

I leaped out the window and dipped, losing height to gain thrust. I wanted to be gone from here. Stupid PRT. I'd call Coil, try to get him to send a van around to my lab and pick up everything he could. Move out and work for the villain until I had the tech I needed to strike out on my own.

My mask affords a three hundred and sixty degree view, so I was able to see Armsmaster carefully aim his Halberd, and juke to the side to get out of way as he fired a grappling hook from it. Armsmaster leaped from the window, and I was able to get some good insights into rocket technology from the way his own miniature jetpack activated and launched him after me.

He was still using fuel for rocket thrusters. Very efficient fuel, but he wouldn't be able to fly long term with that, just short bursts. Better acceleration than me though. I needed a bit more distance…

The grappling hook retracted, and a quick snap of Armsmaster's halberd wound the cable around two more of my jetpack legs, catching them.

I twisted, tried to untangle the cable, only to get punched in the face as Armsmaster reeled himself in.

Mid air maneuvers with two grappling combatants, three kinetic thrusters, and a rocket pack would have been a nightmare. One I wasn't ready for. I had no illusions of being able to take on Armsmaster himself.

Would it be safe to activate Mayhem Protocol this high up? There was a few seconds of blackout before it fully activated. Armsmaster didn't have a lot of juice left, but he'd probably keep us steady…

"Mayhem Protocol. Objectives: survival, esca…"

It was probably quite fortunate that Armsmaster's next punch tazed me before I finished the activation sequence.

Jurric · Mar 14, 2016

"Do you taste pink?" I asked.

I was in a small, circular room. The mirror on one wall was certainly a glass window on the other side, and my hands were handcuffed to the circular table. Miss Militia was sitting across from me. Never did like the flag thing. I wasn't particularly patriotic, didn't see any particular reason to consider America better than any other country. We weren't a beacon of civilization. We weren't a center of innovation. The only claim to fame we really had was the perfection of propaganda.

Maybe I should turn my respect back on. Trouble is, I'd need my phone to do that, and all my external tinkertech had been taken away from me, except for my mask. Guess they were still making a pretense of the unwritten rules.

"I'm sorry, what?" Miss Militia asked.

My handcuffs clinked as I waved her off.

"I have a very complex, delicate neural chip implanted into my brain, and I was just tazed." I licked my lips. "Tazed in the face." I told her, dryly, easy to do when your mouth feels like it's filled with sand. I worked my toes slowly. Spinal implant was working fine. Left foot was hurt quite badly. Probably tore a few tendons. I kept my pain dulled to about fifty percent as a standard precaution, but as soon as I got the chance I was going to alter it to completely block large spikes of pain, like I did fear.

"Do you need medical attention?" Miss Militia asked, concern apparent in her voice.

I waved that off as well.

"Literally the only other person who would know how to fix this sort of thing is my sister, so no. I'm alive, so my insulation must have held. Might get some strange syntenasia from the mask for a while though. I think the wireless connection got a little borked."

I put my head in my hands, and worked the mask off slowly. The mask was working better than I claimed, but I was low on options, and being underestimated would help significantly. I laid the mask on the table, and worked it around, feeling the electronics with my fingers. I knew it perfectly. Weeks of work, getting the components, even making my own, in some cases. I'd soldered every piece of it together.

Part of me wanted to upload everything from the last few hours to the internet, let the PRT deal with the media shitstorm. My mask did record it all. Unfortunately I didn't have a way to connect to the internet. I could have put a wifi receiver into the mask, I had that blueprint, but I hadn't bothered to actually make it, I needed the space for other things. I could have linked it to the internet through the phone I made, but they'd taken that.

"Look, H+…"

"Call me Mayhem." I interrupted. I didn't want the old name attached to a villain persona. I'd take it back later, once I was ready. Or not. It had been a vain hope anyway.

Miss Militia paused. I couldn't see her face, but I could imagine it. She probably looked sad.

Well boo hoo.

"Are you sure? It's a rather…"

"Villainous change? Probably, but it wasn't like I was operating under H+ for long. Minutes, really. It's still early enough to re-brand, I think. Name sounded kind of stupid when Piggot actually used it."

"…Mayhem then," Miss Militia said, voice heavy with resignation. "I'm sorry that you've gone through this. It isn't fair, and I'll admit, we wouldn't normally arrest you for simple hacking. You have to realize, you're a bio-tinker, and there is a certain… stigma to your abilities. That doesn't mean you can't use them in ways that help others."

"If I join the PRT it does." I said sullenly.

"How do you know that? Have you tried? I'm sure that there's a wealth of technology you can give us. I know that I'd be very happy not to have to rely on Panacea for healing."

I chuckled wryly.

"That's what I'd be I guess. A glorified doctor. I'm capable of a lot more than just maintaining the status quo of a human body." I told her.

"Would you mind telling me about what you can do? What sort of designs would you like to implement." Miss Militia asked.

It was tempting, so tempting. Getting a tinker to talk about their work is very easy.

"No. Thank you."

"It must have been very difficult for you, performing surgery on your own brain. What pushed you to do that?"

I snorted.

"Oh please. You've read my history, you know very well."

"But cutting into your own mind? Armsmaster says you've been deadening your emotions. Is that really safe?"

"It gave me what I needed."

It gave me calm. It gave me sight. It gave me the Mayhem Protocol, which I'd probably have to activate now.

Damn it. I was going to hurt so much tomorrow.

"You could have come to us. We could have kept you safe."

That actually made me laugh. Humor was the closest thing I allowed myself to hysteria.

"Safe? Safe? One of the last things I ever saw was the Slaughterhouse fighting the Protectorate. You were a disorganized mess! They tore through you like toddlers!" I practically snarled.

"That was a small town, isolated, cut off by Shatterbird's power. It was a tragedy, what happened there, but it isn't going to happen to you again Adam, and you don't have to take these risks to prepare for it." Miss Militia reassured me.

Heh. Oh, the poor fool. She sounded like she actually believed that.

I sighed, put my head in my hands again. There was already a port open in the back of my head, which the mask plugged into, but I felt around for the ring around that port, and twisted it loose, then lifted the hinged hatch. There was a mesh around my brain itself, to prevent infection and contamination, plus a few chemicals to make it a bit more robust, help it heal from the modifications. I lifted a hinged section off my skull, and grinned as I heard a small gasp. It was only a maintenance hatch, so to speak. Better access to the modifications I'd made.

"Do you have a paperclip?" I asked Miss Militia.

I held out my hands. Probably wouldn't get one, but it was worth a try. If I didn't get the chance to turn my pain off now I'd be very, very sore tomorrow. I'd been like that before, too sore to move, and with hands shaking too much to properly cross the right wires. Not a good way to be.

"What do you need it for?" Miss Militia asked.

"I want to turn off my pain. My ankle hurts rather significantly," I told her.

She muttered something. I didn't hear a reply. Probably some sort of tinkertech earpiece from Armsmaster.

A small piece of wire found its way into my hands, and I started fiddling with the ports at the back of my head. It wasn't that hard, doing this by feel. I'd done it before, just needed to re-route the suppression program slightly. I used to do all my emotion suppression with this port, before I started to work wireless. There was a split second of agony as the program cut out entirely, and then my whole body became numb. Not a good idea to spend too long like this, it was far too easy to do myself serious injury, but it was a good stopgap, and Mayhem was going to mess me up anyway. Pain or no pain.

"Thank you," I told Miss Militia, giving her the paperclip back, closing the hinged flap, putting the larger plug back into my skull, and then putting the mask back on.

Much better, and I was grateful. I'd even wait a while, see if she'd go away before I tried to make my escape.

"Adam, I want to help you. I don't want to get in your way, or stop you from defending yourself, or from saving your sister, or anything that you feel you need to do. I do what to keep you safe though, and what you're doing, it isn't safe." Miss Militia said. The mask let me see her face. It had a deeper effect, when I saw her face. Her eyes really did seem caring.

"Just go." I told her.

Miss Militia sighed, and stood up.

"Oh. And congratulate Piggot. She's made another villain." I drawled as she opened the door.

Her spine straightened, but she didn't look back. Guess she wouldn't. This had probably happened before.

They left me alone for a while, and eventually two armed PRT officers entered the room. One kept a containment foam sprayer on me, and the other unlocked my cuffs.

I smiled.

Mayhem Protocol was my attempt at giving myself a combat thinker power. I couldn't do it directly, I had no idea how to interface my neural enhancements with the sections of my brain responsible for my power, and that was one of the few things I didn't have a blueprint for, but I could still overclock things.

Have you ever heard that myth that you only every use ten percent of your brain? That's bogus, obviously. You use all of your brain, just not all at once. When your brain does light up all at once, that's called a seizure. Or, in my case, it's called turning my mind into a bio-computer.

You see, I didn't have the processing power in my neural chip for the stuff I wanted, combat prediction software, kinetic analysis, martial arts programming, that sort of thing. No matter how small I made the computer, I just couldn't build one with the processing power I needed for those sorts of calculations.

So I didn't. Why would I? I already had something better.

It made things easier. My brain already held all the information I had available, it was already good at calculating distances, thinking of how to move, already knew how to maneuver this body. Mayhem protocol just turned my higher thought processes into extra processing power, then hit my brain with the chemicals and energy to light up like a Christmas tree. It was, of course, much more complicated than that. Both my neural and spinal implants played a huge role in keeping my mind that of a well tuned machine, capable of calmly and, (theoretically,) logically carrying out the steps to a given objective, and capable of adaptively calculating those steps at extreme speed.

...well, almost like a well tuned machine. I called it Mayhem for a reason.

There were a few downsides. Primarily not getting to sit in the driver's seat. I gave my implants an objective, they used my gray matter to achieve it, but if I had too much say in how then that reduced the program's efficiency considerably. Secondly, the computer used the spinal implant to push my body hard. Zero safety margins. I could probably design some in, but part of what made Mayhem so dangerous was that there weren't any. Besides, I'd designed it with fighting the Slaughterhouse in mind, safety margins against them were stupid.

The PRT officer re-cuffed my hands in front of me, and moved behind me as I went out the door of the interrogation room.

How long to activate it for? That was a big question. Too long, and my brain would destroy itself. Anything under ten minutes was safe-ish. Anything longer was a huge risk. Too short though, and I'd wake up in the middle of a fight with no idea how I got there.

At a dead run, it would probably take me about a minute to get out of this building. There were obstacles, and I'd probably have to make sure the PRT didn't just hop in a van and run me down…

"Mayhem. Objectives: survival, escape, evade pursuit. Eight minutes. Activate." I muttered.

"You say something?" One of the PRT troupers asked me.

There was a flash of pain as my neural chip reset itself, then I blanked out.

***

"The human brain is a wonderful thing." I muttered to myself through cracked and bloody lips.

I wasn't fully conscious as I looked around. My body still felt numb, so I'd need to do a visual inspection, and that was going to be tricky considering my mask had been hit hard at some point. I smelled blue, and I tasted loud.

My pain blocking included the horrible headache that Mayhem typically caused, so that was fine. I'd need to sleep soon though, let my brain start to heal itself.

I put my hand on a nearby wall for leverage and stumbled to my feet, ignoring the way my ankle turned on me unnaturally as I did so.

My mask was still on, and still partially working. I took it off long enough to see the damaged transmitter, and discovered that if I applied pressure to it correctly the fractures closed and it transmitted properly. Mostly. The hard drive was damaged as well, slashed. Great, just great. Mayhem had apparently taken an edged weapon to the face at some point.

Let's see. I was in an alley. I was alone. I also had one of Armsmaster's halberd, which was… nice. He had to have at dozen trackers in the thing, so I'd have to ditch it, but I held onto it for now. I'd get rid of it once I was moving. Mayhem must have held onto it for a reason. There was probably still pursuit, eight minutes wasn't long, and Mayhem was hardly capable of taking on the entire Protectorate at once. In fact I seriously doubted that he could take on Armsmaster, not without some decent tinkertech of his own. Which begged the question of how I got the halberd. Probably caught him by surprise somehow. Or stole it or something.

The mask should have footage of what exactly had happened, but that was stored in the hard drive. I'd have to check it later, see if I could recover anything. Not now though. I needed allies. A place to recuperate.

I emerged from the alley, and found a young couple sitting on at a bus stop together. As I stumbled closer the man stepped in front of the girl, and I realized I was covered in blood.

Hopefully it was mine. I could mix up some cell growth formula, coagulant, fix my own wounds pretty easily. If I'd butchered my way out that was harder to fix. Mayhem protocol was another of those things I hadn't really tested. Damn the PRT for making me use it on them.

My arms trembled as I held the halberd threateningly. I wonder what these grip shifts actually did? Looked like a control mechanism based on crush strength. There was a patch of damage near the base of the halberd where the magnetic retrieval mechanism had been smashed, if I lifted a few panels there I could probably get a good look at the launch mechanism…

No. Not the time.

"Your phone." I grated out, shoving the halberd in the face of the man. He put his hands into his pocket carefully, and took it out with two fingers.

I snatched it from him, and backed up, letting them both run as I dialed a number from memory.

It rang, and rang. I limped back into the alley, and started inspecting my body. One pretty deep scalp wound, some sort of hole straight through my left hand… I licked the back of my forearm. O negative, my own blood. Good, I'd just wiped my forehead. I sucked my knuckles. Mostly mine, someone else's in there as well, but not a lot of it. Didn't necessary mean I'd killed someone. I also had a couple of broken ribs, but they weren't bleeding internally. My muscles were doing the equivalent of melting in their own lactic acid, and I'd pulled tendons in nearly all my joints. Manageable, but I was going to need to tinker myself up some medical equipment if I wanted to be able to move tomorrow.

Glad as hell I turned my pain off.

The phone rang out, and I quirked my head. I knew this was the right number. If Coil had some sort of day job…

I rang again. This time the phone rang only once, then stopped. He ended the call.

The bastard.

I sat in the alley, considering what to do next. My home was compromised, my carefully assembled lab was probably already gone. I had a whole host of physical problems, which would need to either be fixed with tinkertech chemicals or a month or so of rehab, and I had… I took out my wallet, and considered my bank account.

Well, if the PRT hadn't frozen my accounts yet, I had a grand total of four dollars to my name.

My head lolled against the alley wall, and I stared across the halberd. Maybe I could sell it?

A gang tag caught my eye. Looked like I was in E88 territory.

Wonder if Piggot had been right about them.

Guess I'd find out.

Jurric · Mar 15, 2016

If I was going to join a gang that was morally dubious at best, and whose core philosophy I despised, I was going to need insurance.

I'd built up a lot of energy. Some from saving it over the last few weeks, most from the recent fights with the PRT. I didn't really have a way of measuring it, which was annoying, but I did know I had enough to seriously improve something. I could climb higher up the Human Augmentation tree, start learning how to cybernetically enhance limbs, get pretty close to full body replacement. I could continue up the Neural Enchantment tree, which mostly seemed to involve Master abilities, techniques for controlling someone with a neural or spinal chip.

I roved the schematics in my head and, eventually, one caught my eye. That could work…

I breached a new tree, and started buying the basic tools, knowledge, and techniques to become an 'Espionage' tinker. It wasn't anything terribly impressive yet. Some basic skills in the field, knowledge of how to mimic accents, how to move in ways that displayed confidence, assurance. Lock-picking, a bit of an improvement to my ability to hack computers. How to properly place and prepare some basic bombs. The bombs themselves were in the weapons tree, but they were very closely linked, I could probably snatch them from this tree without much hassle.

It was all subtle stuff, but very useful. There was some disguise tech further up the tree, before it started to branch into 'Electronic Espionage' 'Industrial Espionage' and 'Miniaturized Technology,' but I ignored that in favor of some basic chemical creation schematics and subtle tool creation skills.

I still don't quite know how my power ranks things. It wasn't really by danger, or utility or anything like that. Nuclear bombs were only halfway up the weapons tech tree. It wasn't quite how difficult things were to assemble either. In fact there were these sort of… knots in my tech trees, where there was a huge cluster of tools and skills to make one standard blueprint. At first I thought it was just standard progression. Make one thing and it gives you what you need to make the next, but while that was close, it wasn't quite that either.

Probably some combination of all of it.

Oooh, there was an EMP in here as well. Quite low on the tree too, I doubt it would work on Armsmaster, if I can make electrical shielding for my neural chips, he could easily shield his own gear. Still, I imagined it would be a hard counter to Kid Win. Poor fellow. Don't know why my power stuck a grappling gun in the Espionage tree, but I ignored that as well. I didn't need a grappling gun when I could just rebuild the jetpack and fly.

No, I was after something else. It would still be a few weeks before I had the energy to unlock it, but that was fine. I'd need a week or so to physically make the equipment I'd need anyway.

Finding E88 gang members was frustratingly difficult considering I was probably doing some permanent damage to my ankle every time I put weight on it. It was still only about nine in the morning, not the time of day you normally find gang bangers on the streets.

In the end the E88 found me. Lucky really. It was either them or the PRT, and I only had two minutes of Mayhem left before I started collecting brain damage.

"Mein friend. It seems that you've been causing trouble in our territory." Krieg said, a slightly hostile note in his voice. His mask was a pure white theater mask, covering his upper face, so I could see the slight grin on his lips as he eyed me. Telekinetic, probably wouldn't be able to get close without Mayhem, and even then, I didn't know what the other one could do, other than flickering occasionally.

I'd been deliberately searching the seedier parts of E88 territory, and I was currently in an underground parking lot that had been heavily tagged with the E88's gang sign. Krieg wasn't alone. He had someone I didn't recognize with him, a pale albino, whose face wasn't covered. Probably a Breaker/Changer state. Wouldn't pay to assume though.

I was high enough up the Espionage tree to know that Krieg's accent was fake. Quite a good fake accent though. Should I put one on to? Bet I could do better than he did. Needed a rubber band around part of the tongue though, and a scalpel and some glue to get the vocal cords just right.

Nope. Wait. Not my sister. I had control still. I could do this. I didn't need to mesh Human Augmentation and Espionage like that, I could just practice for a bit. Or I could focus on the conversation. The one with the two potentially hostile capes that was happening right the fuck now.

Fake fear. Fake respect. Excitement probably didn't come into it. Note to self, turn those back on ASAP. Piggot probably picked up on it, and it might have had something to do with how disastrous that all turned out.

"Um. Yes. Sorry. I probably frightened a few people… um, I can rebuild the phone and give it back if that's a problem. I only took it apart a little bit." In other news, I had circuitry dangling from the side of my mask. At least I didn't need to hold it together to see properly anymore. "I um, heard you might be willing to recruit a tinker. Give me a lab and resources, and I'll work for you." I said.

I should have kept the halberd, instead of tossing it back in the alley. It was proof that I was, at the very least, a parahuman. As it was, unless I opened my skull up, I didn't have any obvious tinkertech. Oh there was the tech dangling from my mask, but that wasn't tinkertech, that was a kid's arts and crafts project. A mobile phone did not make for the best glue, but I kind of didn't have any actual glue, so a mobile phone was improvised into a brace and an extension of a couple of cut wires.

Still, I was wearing a mask and covered in blood; both were pretty good signs I was a parahuman. They'd probably believe me, and the PRT would have to have some sort of press release soon, I doubt my escape went completely unnoticed.

Krieg looked me up and down questioningly, and his posture slowly changed, a tad less combative, but still wary.

"You want to join? Well, we're always happy to have new members. Have you killed anyone?"

I shook my head, then realized that I didn't actually know that, not for sure. Well… hopefully I hadn't killed anyone. Krieg must have picked up on my uncertainly, and I kicked myself for not using the espionage skills. I had them, but it was a conscious choice to activate them, and it took work right now, because I didn't actually want to blend in with racist pricks. It was like forcing a smile in a horrible customer service job.

"Look, we might be able to help you, we might not. Depends on what you've done, and to who. If you're really sincere about joining though, you can come with us, we'll take you somewhere safe. From there Kaiser will review the situation, and make the final decision. How about that?"

"I… wouldn't mind some medical treatment too?" I said hesitantly.

If they left me in a clinic I could patch myself up, maybe even build something to help me escape, if it was necessary.

"That can be arranged, it will be a few hours before Othala is free, will you last until then?" Krieg asked.

"I'd prefer a clinic, if that's all right. I'm not sure what my specialty is, but I have biological leanings. Pretty sure I can fix myself up quite well with the right tools."

Krieg and the pale man exchanged a look.

"If you'll excuse me, I need to make a brief call." He told me.

I shrugged.

"Mind if I sit down?" I asked.

"Go ahead." Krieg told me.

I sat.

"So uh… sorry, I don't think I've read about you. Are you new?" I asked him.

He nodded.

"Yeah, fairly new. Name's Alabaster."

"Nice to meet you." I said tiredly. "Mine is Mayhem. I don't recommend it, it's exhausting."

"Yeah, what did you do?"

"Wish I knew. Might be able to grab some footage from my mask. Might not. I was in a tinker-cybernetic-drug-fueled fighting-coma."

"That's the official term is it?" Alabaster asked.

"I made it, I name it." I said, closing my eyes.

Krieg was true to his word, the phone call was quick. Wish I'd built a tinkertech microphone into the mask so I could hear him. I didn't have the blueprint for that yet, but it would cost me less than a normal day's worth of energy. Might be worth it in the near future.

"I'd be happy to deliver you to a clinic, but there is a small logistics issue. I will need to drive you there, and I was in enough of a rush to find the new cape wandering our territory that I didn't take the 'company car.' Would you mind if we blindfolded you?" Krieg reported.

I took the mask off wordlessly. Alabaster was quiet. Wonder if I squicked him out. Or maybe he was just shy, the new guy letting the experienced one run the show.

"Ah, I see. Not a problem then." Krieg said, sounding uncertain. "If you'd follow me…"

They lead me out of the carpark, and down the street. I didn't see the car that they ushered me into, but the seats were comfortable, and for a minute there I had assumed that they'd make me ride in the boot, so that was a welcome relief.

I had slightly less desire to join the E88 than I did the PRT, but there were several subtle differences that came into play.

Firstly, I didn't mind lying to the E88. I could build them stuff with inbuilt detonators, and blow it when I left the organization, which I would do once I had the tools and tinkertech I needed. Maybe even take out some of the worst members of the gang. Classic infiltration. Might even be able to buy my way back into the Protectorate's good graces with insider information. Or I might be able to bring them in on my own. I think one of my blueprints might do it… but it might not. I didn't have it yet, which meant my understanding of how it worked was based entirely on a fairly vague impression of the item I wanted.

Secondly I didn't see the E88 restricting what I made with my tech like the PRT would. For one thing, as far as I knew they didn't have any tinkers of their own. No one who would understand my work. No one who would be able to figure out what exactly I was building. For another, as a gang, I expected them to have a slightly looser stance on the more dangers aspects of technology. I could build bombs, I could build biotech weapons, I could make the sort of things that would damage the Nine.

Thirdly, they'd fought the Nine before, they'd been instrumental in driving the Nine out of Brockton Bay the first time that they came here. I had no illusions that they'd protect me, but if I succeeded in luring the Nine to the Bay, I'd have skilled cannon fodder around me. Expendable capes. I might not be happy with the Protectorate right now, or the Wards by extension, but that didn't mean I was willing to kill them as readily as I was a bunch of Nazis. It could go quite well, all they'd need to do is distract the Siberian for a few seconds while my reactors wound up…

I needed to build new boots soon. Wouldn't pay to be caught without them.

Jurric · Mar 16, 2016

I kept track of the turns, but considering I didn't know this part of the city well, I was still hopelessly lost when we stopped. I was, however, feeling quite positive. Perhaps it was good that Coil hadn't answered my call. Betraying him wouldn't have nearly as positive an impact on this city as betraying the Empire, when the time came.

Someone opened the car door for me, and I was given my mask back. It didn't work. Whoever had been holding it had jostled things. Deliberate sabotage? I ran my fingers over the wires. No, not deliberate, or if it was deliberate, incredibly clumsy. Just a pair of wires that I'd hastily wrapped together while I was patching the mask no longer connected to each other. It might even have happened naturally. I wasn't really thinking when I made the repairs, and I didn't have the tools to do a proper job.

I twisted the wires back together, and winced as distorted, loud, vision was restored to me. I was going to have to make fixing that a priority, but I could still see, I just had more than the normal amount of Synesthesia.

I was at some sort of private clinic. No advertising on the front face of the building, indicated it was open, or even it's nature as a clinic, but I could tell that the doors had been designed to open for a stretcher, so Krieg probably hadn't just kidnapped me to a random holding area.

Alabaster helped me up, and I leaned on him to take the weight off my bad ankle, which now had a nasty tendency to roll whenever I put weight on it. Too many of the supporting tendons had been torn. I was probably going to have to grow new ones and attach them surgically. Or chop it off and use a prosthetic. I wasn't at the stage where I could make a prosthetic better than the original yet, but I was close, and I could still make less effective ones. It would only slightly reduce my speed.

The clinic was an opulent one. The floor was lined with marble, there were small statues and well watered plants in every nook, and the walls were lined with certificates and awards.

There was no desk or reception office. This was the sort of building that didn't have wait times, or queues, probably not even appointments. Just a small group of very select clientele, who could walk in at any time to receive no questions asked care.

There was a greeter though. A pretty young woman with her face seemingly locked in a permanent cheerful smile. She looked from me, to Krieg, to Alabaster, and then back at me. All three of us were masked, and that didn't seem to bother or surprise her.

"How can I help you today?" She asked, her voice almost chirping with happiness.

Human Augmentation did include some fairly extensive knowledge on drugs, but I still wasn't quite able to identify what she was taking. Probably some sort of personal mix. Taste was an excellent indicator, but I was self aware enough to avoid trying to lick her skin to find out. Barely.

"Our friend here needs medical attention. He is to be afforded every courtesy." Krieg told her.

"Of course. If you'll follow me." The girl said, leading me deeper into the clinic.

She was leading me to a GP's office for analysis, but we passes a sign pointing to the operating theatre on the way. I pointed at it, and looked at Krieg.

"Do you mind?" I asked.

He pursed his lips, and then nodded.

"All right. Go ahead."

I turned that way, Alabaster helped me, and we ignored the girl as we headed for the large double doors of the surgery.

"Never actually thought I'd be in one of these." Alabaster mused, keeping me steady when we entered the clean, well organized room.

Krieg placated the girl, who was probably a nurse, as I started rummaging in boxes full of surgical tools. Step one, lock ankle in place so I could hobble on it. Step two, fix mask. Step three, glue ribs back in place. Step four, sew up hand. I could do this.

I improvised a splint with several rolls of bandages and some medical tools, and then shrugged the pale man off to explore the room on my own. Not everything I needed was here, but most of it was, and I imagine that they had at least some of the other stuff, just not in the surgery itself. They had their drug fridge in here though, fortunately large and well stocked. I could work with that.

"I don't think that splint is properly made, you're going to hurt your leg more, walking on it like this." The girl said, as cheerful as ever.

"I know. Don't really care, I can work on that later. Might amputate, go for something robotic. Quicker than making a recovery the normal way." I told her.

She smiled, and let me work.

Alabaster stuck around to guard me. Eventually Krieg left, and was replaced with Victor, who watched my work wordlessly, like the hawk his mask was stylized after. By the time Victor arrived I had a small chemistry lab set up near the electrical outlet, and I'd already begun injecting myself. The bone glue finished first, so I pulled my ribs into the proper position, injected the glue, and then held the rib in place for the thirty seconds the glue needed to set, then moved onto the next rib.

I'd already stitched my wounds closed, so I applied the cell growth formula, and wrapped them in bandages I'd already dipped into a very potent disinfectant. Then I drank the immune booster I'd made, and set to work on fixing the mask with a small soldering iron the nurse's mother had been able to dig up from somewhere.

Eventually, I was done. About as patched up as I could make myself, due to fully heal in about five days, provided I kept up the right doses of the right drugs. The mask was working, but it was an ugly fix, and I would probably have to make a new one if I wanted the smooth white surface back.

Still wasn't quite certain what to do about my ankle. I was torn between replacement and tendon reattachment. On the one hand I didn't mind the idea of a prosthetic, and it would cut recovery time by about a day. On the other hand it wouldn't be quite as good as a normal foot, and it would be metallic, leaving it open to attack by capes who would normally be stopped by the Manton limit. On the third hand, I'd have more room for the reactor in my rocket boots. Bigger explosion, more chance of catching the whole Nine…

In the end the problem was solved for me. A young woman in a skintight red bodysuit walked in past Victor, and he ceased leaning casually on the doorpost to walk in at her side.

"So, you're a new Tinker, huh?" Victor said, speaking for the first time since I'd seen him. His voice sounded smooth and reassuring, which was nice. Pretty sure he sounded like whatever he wanted to sound like, and if he wanted to reassure me, I'd take my odds that it wasn't so a knife could be planted in my back.

"Fairly new." I told him. I think the woman was Othala. Couldn't be sure though, she was new, not a lot of footage of her on PHO yet. If it was her then I was golden. She was the Empire's healer, they wouldn't send her into a straight up fight.

In fact, considering I couldn't see Hookwolf anywhere, I could be pretty sure they were going to accept me. It made sense to send a brute who could take just about anything against an unknown like myself.

"And you came to us? Why exactly?"

Part of infiltration is knowing when, and where to lie. I wasn't high enough up the tree to fool someone like Victor yet, he'd doubtless stolen a lot of social skills over the years. So instead I told the truth.

"Money. Desperation. The PRT knows where I live, and I didn't have any tech to fix myself up. I admit, I'm not to sold on your… central philosophy, but I can supply you tinkertech in exchange for a lab and funding." I told him.

It was hard to read someone with a mask on. Othala had this weird diamond-egg thing on her mask, which was just a flap of fabric tied around her ears and over her nose. A diamond with two legs coming out the bottom. Wonder what that was about? I was staring at it when she gently touched my arm, and my body started tingling.

Ah, healing. Or more accurately, gifting me regeneration. That could be quite bad, depending on how it worked. I blinked, put my hands on the back of my skull, felt the edges of my implants… no, it seemed to be a more efficient form of normal regeneration, and my work was designed not to require constantly re-cutting myself. My wounds were already sewed shut and the my bones were lined up and sealed together. I'd need to take some staples out in forty five seconds, but it wasn't life threatening if I missed them. Naturally it decided what I was going to do about my ankle as well, no recovery time made surgery a much better option.

"Krieg said that your name was Mayhem? You want to keep that, or can we rename you?"

And end up with something German or racially prejudiced? Not if I could help it.

"I like what I have, sort of told it to the PRT before I fought them… I kind of don't know how that fight went. Do you…?"

I went silent.

"Still getting the news now, but it looks like you tore them a new asshole. Kaiser wants to see you in person, you good to come with us?"

"Uh, yeah, sure. Do you want me to take the mask off again?"

Victor eyed the mask, and shook his head.

"Nah. You're good. You're obviously a tinker, you fought the PRT, we can extend you a little bit of trust. Follow me. You can keep the scalpel if it makes you feel safer."

Well damn. I thought I was being subtle about that. It was a simple stainless scalpel, razor sharp and coated in the fastest acting sedative I could create. I was keeping it bound to my left wrist with some bandages. Still, if Victor knew about it, and wasn't going to take it away, that was a good sign.

The car ride from the clinic to some kind of safe house was boring. I was a little worried about being seen, despite the tinted windows, but this was the heart of E88 territory, where the cops knew which cars to stop, and which not to, and the windows were well over the legal tinting laws. I was as safe as I could be, at least without some kind of cloaking technology.

The room I was shown into was metal. Made of metal, lined with it. The door swung open unaided, guided by some sort of hidden mechanism. The walls… shifted. Growing as I watched them, complex lines and geometries of structural reinforcement growing in patterns across the walls.

Kaiser was sitting on a throne at the far end of the room. He gestured, and two iron chairs rose from the floor.

"Please, have a seat." He said.

Victor took one of the chairs, and I took the other, trying not to appear as if I was sitting on the edge, ready to run. Not that I could do that. The door had been pushed closed again, the room was surrounded. Might be able to use Mayhem to nick Victor and Kaiser with the scalpel, might not. Either way I'd still be stuck in here, just waiting for the other gang members to open the iron tomb…

That really wasn't the way I wanted to be thinking right now.

I'd readjusted my emotions again. Respect, excitement and embarrassment were back, and fear was allowed, but only at five percent normal levels. I wasn't used to it, after all this time. It felt foreign, but I think that, on the whole, I needed a little. Just not much.

I gulped, faking the fear response. Kaiser expected me to be afraid, and my infiltration skills were urging me to play on that. He wanted a subordinate, I could play that role. Victor was good at reading people, very, very skilled at it, but only as much as a human could be, he wasn't perfect, and my responses weren't baseline human anyway, considering what I had done to my brain.

"Word came in from our spies in the PRT while you were driving over." Kaiser observed.

"And, did I kill anyone?" I asked, forgetting the infiltration for a moment.

"Indirectly, yes. A PRT officer died in the car chase. Panacea was able to save everyone at the PRT office itself, although there were several people there who would have died without her care."

I breathed out a sigh of relief. I knew the rules. If I killed a cape, that was a big deal. Maybe not a death sentence, in and of itself, depending on the circumstances, but one officer? Canon fodder. Hookwolf killed a couple every month, and if it was in a car chase, it wasn't directly my fault. The E88 would probably be fine with this. It was something to bind me to them, something that meant I needed their protection, but it wasn't something that they wouldn't allow.

I shouldn't have felt relief, a human had died. Later, I learned his name. Malison Haralds, a twenty seven year old man, divorced, one daughter, eleven, who he loved and spoiled as much as his career would let him. His life ended because of me, and I felt relief.

That, I think, was where things started to go wrong.

Jurric · Mar 17, 2016

"What 'ch doin'?" Rune said cheerfully, poking her head into my lab.

She'd unmasked to me three days ago, just two days after my introduction to Kaiser. Her real name was Zoey Macrel. I didn't know her in her civilian identity, so that didn't really matter to me. Probably better just to think of her as Rune. It would make fighting her easier, when the time came. She preferred Rune, even in private conversation, so it wasn't hard to do.

That was the danger of infiltrating an organization. Once you get to know most people they have at least some redeeming qualities. Rune was quite a nice person, friendly, cheerful. It was sick, what her parents did to her, but her 'uncle' Krieg had killed them, and now her loyalty to the 'cause' was almost unshakable. When I betrayed the gang she'd probably try to kill me, along with the rest.

And yet she was still good company.

Kaiser was still treating me with kid gloves. I was allowed to go wherever I wanted, but due to the Protectorate's manhunt it was 'recommended' that I travel with a 'bodyguard.' At least he'd selected some of his more intelligent and personable men to watch me. Krieg, Victor, sometimes Crusader. None of the hard cases like Hookwolf. Today it was Krieg's turn, and he'd brought his 'niece,' probably an attempt to socialize me, get me connected to the Empire at a deeper level. Or it could have been Rune's idea, as she claimed it was, a desire to meet the only other parahuman in the empire who was around her age.

"I guarantee you that if I actually answer that you'll throw up." I told her, the smile on my face not entirely forced.

Rune stepped into my lab, trailing her fingers over my equipment, her fingers twitching as she marked everything she passed. I was fairly sure that wasn't a sign of aggression, just a thing she did, a habit that was probably very useful to her. If I could only telekinetically lift something after I marked it, I'd mark everything in my proximity as well.

"Come on, I saw you open up your brain, and it wasn't that bad. How much you gunna bet?"

"Five bucks." I told her. Moving the fire extinguisher on my bench over a bit so she couldn't see my arm as she came closer.

She looked at Stacy, the nurse who I had met when I first came to clinic.

I'd finally figured out exactly what Stacy and her mother were on, a personalized blend of anti-depressants and marijuana. They were both functional addicts, quite capable of performing complex, delicate tasks under the influence, but their incessant cheerfulness was really, really getting on my nerves. It would be pretty easy to tinker up something that altered their neural chemistry to be resistant to the drugs, make them actually face what the world had to offer, and I was seriously tempted to do just that.

Stacy shook her head, keeping my secret from the inquisitive gang member, and I decided that I'd leave her neural alterations for another day.

Rune scrunched up her brow in thought, eyed the nearby biowaste bin, decided she was more brave than scared, and held out her hand.

"Cheapskate, it's not a guarantee if that's all you're betting, shake on it." She told me.

I smiled, and shook her hand with my left, an awkward grip, she'd held out her right hand, but I wasn't being tricked that easily.

"Fine fine. I'm curious now. Show me what you're doing." Rune demanded.

I pushed the fire extinguisher away. I'd get Stacy to put that back on the wall now, we were past the point where it might be needed, the battery had been successfully installed, and honestly, the chances of it exploding into flame had been incredibly remote anyway.

Rune stared at my right hand. She went a little pale, but she didn't look away, slowly accustoming herself to the sight.

"That's not… too bad. I mean, I think I can see your bones, I guess those are tendons, but it's not bleeding or anything, and I know you've turned your pain off. You owe me five bucks. And an explanation, that looks like a really complicated thingy-mabob. Why have you cut your hand up like that?"

"I'm installing a tazer." I told her, getting back to work on the circuitry. "We're past the hard part, the battery is installed in my radius and ulna, the two bones in the forearm. They won't produce blood cells anymore, but I've artificially boosted production for the rest of my body, so that's fine. The tricky part was making it so that the battery could bend and flex, like normal bone marrow."

"So now you're building the tazer itself?" Rune asked, eying the deep holes in my wrists. I had the tech to heal those up nice and quick though, without scarring. I was a pessimist, but I didn't want to go that emo.

"Yep. I want to be able to take someone out with a touch, so I've run the wires up my hand, into my fingers, I just need to make sure I can't electrocute myself, add a charging port, which is going to go near my elbow, and then make sure my body won't reject it every time Othala heals me."

Rune frowned.

"That's pretty cool. Just to let you know, if you prank me with that I'm going to mark your shirt and throttle you with it."

"Of course. This is for fighting, not pranks." I told her seriously.

"Heh, so serious, for someone with the name Mayhem you spend way too much time locked in a lab." Rune said, turning her eyes away from my very delicate operation and spying a swivel chair. She collapsed into it theatrically, squiggled with her finger on the seat, and then lifted it with her power, tilting it and raising it into a sort of semi-hammock transport.

"All right. Where's my money." She demanded impishly.

I gestured vaguely in the direction of my wallet with my left hand, I kept it near the door, though why I bothered to keep cash in it was beyond me. I had a budget now, several thousand dollars a month, and an initial bonus to get me started, but of course I spent that through the empire. I talked with Victor about what I needed, and he got it for me. Scrounging for old computers at the dump was a thing of the past.

The new availability of resources, plus the extra time I had now that I wasn't going to school anymore, meant that I was catching up with my power. I wasn't there yet, but I was close. I'd rebuilt my mask, with wifi and new tinkertech microphones for listening in on far away conversations. I'd rebuilt my boots, and I was nearly finished with an improved version of my jetpack, I just needed to wait for my forges to finish smelting some of the more exotic elements, and for the reinforcements to my ribcage to set properly.

My old jetpack had been stolen from me. The new one would be a part of me. The sub-dermal braces would double as high grade body armor for my torso, the legs would be detachable, just in case I needed to fit in with the rest of society. I'd narrowed the legs and made them more flexible, to the point where it seemed more accurate to call them arms, then swapped out the four reactors I used to keep in the legs themselves, for two more effective ones that were going to be built into my back. There would be a couple of large, obvious lumps near my spine, but their profile was low enough to be covered by a shirt, my ribcage was tough enough to support the weight, and I could increase skin growth in the area, to prevent the flesh being pulled too tight and splitting.

Combing two of my tech trees like this was… interesting. I didn't have an actual blueprint for what I was doing, just a couple of other blueprints, and just enough skills to be able to work the two together. The end result wouldn't be quite safe as the original design, but I'd already modified the original design to explode on command, so that wasn't saying much.

In another week or so I should have enough energy to unlock a blueprint that would teach me how to directly run energy from the new reactors to the tazer in my hand, rather than rely on the batteries in my bones. That would be handy, the fully charged tazer only had enough energy for three bursts under normal conditions, then it needed a recharge.

I would have put off installing it until after I could run the tazer from the reactors, but I needed an excuse to open the hand up. You see, my espionage tree had born wonderful fruit.

But it didn't pay to think about that. Step one to a successful infiltration, think like you're one of them. Construct a personality, think how they want you to think, and trust yourself enough to pull back from the brink when the time comes. I'd very nearly done that literally, but the Mayhem protocol left me close enough to a Dissociative Identity Disorder as it was, so no thank you powers, I'd keep my brain re-writing to emotion manipulation.

I finished assembling the electronics in my hand, filled the fluid canisters very carefully, and then sealed the skin back up.

Rune rifled through my wallet for a while, complained loudly that I didn't have the right change, and collected a twenty. I let her. I'd learned not to argue, she had this way of floating above me and nagging until she got her way.

She floated over to my computer next, and I groaned inwardly. I built it myself, and of course I built as much processing power as I could into the thing. I wasn't a computer tinker by any means, but I had some basic knowledge, enough to make it slightly better than top of the line. When I built a fast computer though, I did it so I could perform complex calculations, run simulations for me, that sort of thing. I should never have tried to distract Rune with it.

She complained that it still couldn't run Crysis on max settings. I complained that she was cluttering my computer with unnecessary junk. Somehow it turned into an argument about aliens, which she won.

I don't know how she did that, but I do know that if I ever argued with her again, I wasn't doing it after I stayed up till five AM tinkering.

My flesh was knitting nicely when I heard the singing. Sweet, young. Familiar.

"The toe bone's connected to the, knee bone,
The knee bone's connected to the, hip bone,
The hip bone's connected to the, spine bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!"

It felt like ice going down my spine to hear that, familiar as it was.

"The fuck? What is this Mayhem?" Rune asked, floating rapidly away from the screen.

"One of the few videos of the only other living 'wet' tinker at work." I said, as casually as I could manage. I hadn't deleted that video simply because I didn't need to. Watching it could be justified, and trying to hide that I was looking up information about my sister might have been suspicious. Not that they knew she was my sister. We only casually resembled each other, and the PRT hadn't announced that fact, probably trying to prevent a panic.

I'd probably have to announce it myself soon. I couldn't leave Riley much longer. She was my sister. My responsibility. One way or the other, I planned to free her soon.

At first my plan had been to track the Nine down, attack them in a small town somewhere, where there would be less collateral damage. The only problem with that was the other members of the Nine. They were dangerous, not many of them would know my face, and I doubt that Jack described me to them, and then said, 'hey, I've got something special planned for this kid, bring him to me when you see him.' It would be just my luck if I attacked the Nine, and was killed on the outskirts of whatever town they were attacking by a patrolling Shatterbird or Siberan. No, I needed them to come to me. Needed Jack to stay true to his promise. Needed my sister nearby. There would be more collateral this way, but considering how many people the Nine had killed over the years, it would be small in comparison.

"Well, that was incredibly disturbing." Rune said, the computer shutting itself off as a pencil she'd been twirling shot towards the power button. She was looking far more green now than she had been when she was inspecting my arm.

I shrugged, staying silent and focused on my work.

"You're in a mood. Normally you tell me off when I don't shut your computer down properly." Rune told me.

"Perhaps I've just given up?" I told her, dipping my hand into a pre-prepared tub of chemicals that would prevent scars from forming, and aid in cell growth. I didn't really need Othala, although I had booked her in for when I installed the generators in my back. That would save me a significant amount of time.

"Hmm, nope. There's something going on. What's on your mind May? You can tell me." Rune demanded.

I winced internally. I did not like being called May, and Rune could never know, or it would be the only thing she ever called me.

"I guess I'm still annoyed that my blackmail didn't work out." I told her.

I had managed to scavenge a few brief scenes from my visor, but nothing that would be a huge PR disaster for them. The information on Sophia bullying Taylor was now nearly useless. The PRT had officially arrested their wayward Ward, and the 'Ongoing Investigation' into the matter was now closed. It had been startling, how quickly a startled Piggot could move.

A payout to the Heberts, a very carefully worded press statement, a small spree of arrests.

Part of me was still furious with Taylor, accepting a payout and a moving to Arcadia instead of going to the media. The hush money had probably been quite good, the main instigators of her torment were lined up to go to Juvie once sentencing was complete, and I'm fairly sure that Sophia's case worker was also serving jail time, but she could have used this to wreck the PRT, instead of signing a NDA with her father and just… letting it go.

"Yeah, annoying, but that's the PRT for you. They got the PR part down to an art. Only thing they're really good at." Rune said. "You need to forget about it, find something to take your mind off it. Uncle Krieg has got a bunch of Earth Aleph moves, and we just got a new wide-screen. You should come around tonight. I've invited Alabaster too, us newbie's got to stick together."

"I have to finish my generators. They're at a crucial stage." I told her.

Rune glanced at Stacy, who was silently tidying up the bench I'd been using for surgery, cleaning and disinfecting it with alcoholic swabs.

"You can tell me what to do, and I'll keep your forges running. They look pretty simple." Stacy said with a bright smile.

OK, I take it back. Her drug problem was going to be solved this afternoon. I just needed an excuse to strap her to the operating table so I could inject the right chemicals into her brain.

"It's not simple, it's really complicated. These are exotic forms of matter beyond the understanding of modern science!" I told them both.

Heh. Another argument that I had already lost.

Jurric · Mar 18, 2016

The ring smelt slightly of blood, there was human blood in there, but it wasn't all human. There were a few other species that I couldn't identify without dipping into the Animal Augmentation tree. I could make some guesses, the trees were closely intertwined, but really the only fighting animals popular in the Bay were dogs and cockerels, so my investigative nose wasn't telling me anything my brain couldn't figure out.

Did you know that intimidation is a separate emotion to fear? It's actually tied in pretty closely to respect, and my recent attempts to focus my neural modifications did leave me open to intimidation. Not fully, there were still a lot of fear aspects tied up in intimidation, and I wasn't feeling those. No, what I got when I looked at Hookwolf wasn't anything to do with fear, it was just a strong desire not to have to fight him.

… Whelp, too bad about that. Sorry emotions. You're the reason I'm here in the first place, so you don't get a say.

You see the Slaugherhouse just got a new member. One of Heartbreaker's daughters, she was calling herself Cherish.

Hatchet Face, the member she'd replaced, he wasn't really someone I anticipated being a problem to my future plans. If I was anything other than a tinker, definitely, but while my power might stop working in his field, but my tech wouldn't. I basically trumped him by the simple expedient of being me. Yay, one member of the Nine whose primary power couldn't kill me horribly, and whose secondary brute toughness I could hopefully avoid!

But no, they had to go and replace him with a Master whose estimated range was frickin terrifying. As this wasn't hard enough already.

Cherish was a particular threat to me, because she might be able to tell Jack what I was planning. Maybe not exactly what I was going to do, but what I was feeling. I could turn some emotions off, but turning off all of them would just leave me an unmotivated psychopath. Jack was smart and cautious, if Cherish told him what I was feeling, and that included feeling… I don't know, resigned and determined…

So I needed anti-Master tech, stat. There was some further up the Neural Enhancement branch. Stuff that could monitor and perhaps even shield my brain from interference by an outside source. The problem was that the tech was a lot higher up the branch than I had climbed. Several months of energy higher, at least at my current rates. So I needed to collect energy more quickly.

"What's the geek doing here?" Cricket asked.

I nodded to her, but addressed Hookwolf, going up to him and putting out my hand for him to shake.

"I'd like to learn how to fight, and Victor told me that this was probably the best place for that." I told him.

Actually Victor had offered to teach me himself, it just hadn't been combative enough for my power. He was a good teacher, he stole his teaching skills from the best I'm sure, but an afternoon of being carefully taught how to properly move just didn't give me more energy than normal. Getting him to suggest this place took a bit of work, actually. I'd had to insinuate that I got better ideas after a fight, which he seemed to buy. I still didn't want to share the exact details of my powers with anyone.

Hookwolf smiled, took my hand and casually ground the bones together. I didn't wince. I came prepared, and my pain was currently sitting on a barely perceptible two percent. I was relying on the enhanced understanding of my own body that Human Augmentation supplied to make sure I didn't rupture anything.

"You want to learn to fight huh? You think that you've got what it takes to tussle with the Empire's front-line? Well… everyone gets a chance to prove themselves, but this isn't your schoolyard boy. This is the real thing. You watch a fight first, if you're still around afterwards, we'll see what you've got."

I nodded.

It would probably be a bad idea to introduce myself to the rest of the group now. I'd have to wait until I won a fight or something. On the other hand, I couldn't afford to wait too long, too much familiarity meant I couldn't shake their hands in a nice, casual manner.

Hookwolf whistled at two men, whose names I never bothered learning, and who I thought of as Eagle Head Baldy and Blonde Man. They smirked at each other, got into the ring, and started punching.

No countdown. No lead-up. No gloves.

I tried not to think about the fact that I'd be in there soon, and let my power analyze the fight.

Testicular hemotoma. Frontal cephalohemotoma. Rib fractures. Scalp hemotoma and concussion. More rib fractures.

And we had a win… nope, the loser was going for a beer bottle.

Facial lacerations and glass foreign bodies.

"How often does Othala come around here?" I asked Cricket, who was watching with a smirk as Stormtiger leaped into the ring and smashed the loser to the ground, grinding the shards of the glass bottle into his hand. Apparently hitting the winner in the face with a glass bottle wasn't actually allowed by the rules. The winner was going over to his buddies, who were beating him on the back and… just ripping the glass out of his face. Wonderful. No wonder so many of these idiots had scars.

"Prissy bitch couldn't handle this shit." Cricket said with a smirk.

I nodded. Right. No, wait! Not right. How the hell did the Empire have any soldiers left? Part of me thought that maybe this was a bad idea as I stood up. I ignored that part of me. Since when had I ever had good ideas?

"You done here?" Cricket asked.

"No. I'd like to use my tech though. As a trial, and because I need to learn to fight with it. It's implanted, so I doubt I'll ever be without it."

"Sure. No killing." Cricket said, sounding bored.

I nodded, gulped to make them think that I was actually capable of feeling fear, and vaulted over the low, raised wall that surrounded the ring.

Before I got my power I was thin as a weed, with the physical fitness of your typical panic-attack prone shut-in. I was still thin, but over the last week I'd been starting to explore some of the lower level Human Augmentation options. I had access to some fairly decent tinkertech steroids, but I couldn't use them without first figuring out how it would effect the chemical balance in my brain. Some of the stuff I'd done up there was decidedly non-standard, and while I could normally counter the side effects of my drugs with careful monitoring, I needed a few test subjects before I could really be sure.

No, what I was working with now was even lower on my trees than that. A week of the perfect exercise schedule and power selected health foods.

God it was annoying. It would have been so much simpler if I could just build a new body, but breaching the Espionage tree, and my work on my jetpack, and my sudden need for anti-master tech meant that it would be a long time before I climbed that high.

Hookwolf held up a hand, silencing the crowd.

"Who's ready to go easy on the new kid?" He grated out.

Huh. Well, I guess Kaiser really did want to keep a tinker around, probably warned Hookwolf not to scare me off. Good to know in a way, but I don't think that this would be the best way to get energy.

A couple of men raised their hands.

Hookwolf pointed at one.

"Donald. You're up. Show him why we're the ones Kaiser can actually rely on."

Donald was huge. Towering over me by half a foot, and broader in the shoulders.

There was no setup to the fight. No starting noise or sound, he vaulted the barrier and punched me in the gut.

I gasped for breath, reached around to zap him with my tazer fingers, and he brushed my hand aside as casually as swatting a fly, then grabbed my collar.

I grabbed his arm, released the electricity. His body started twitching immediately, and it took a fair bit of my focus and coordination not to fall over with him.

There was silence, a few glares, and I was starting to wonder if Cricket was wrong about weapons being allowed when Hookwolf barked a laugh.

"Guess the new kid has teeth after all."

Apparently when Hookwolf laughs, everyone else laughs with him.

I chuckled as well, wasting the second charge on my tazer fingers by holding them up in a V and making a visible burst of energy crackle between them.

"You um, don't need to worry about losing, or anything. I'm a parahuman, I need to test my powers. Sorry if that's sort of cheating." I said, grinning in a way that was obviously far to cocky.

"You hear that boys. He wants a test!" Hookwolf yelled. "Have we got any volunteers."

Everyone in the room raised their hands.

Right. I was going to need more than a tazer for this. Fortunately, I had more.

Not the jetpack. That was the sort of thing that would break pretty easily in a fight, and it had it's own targeting software, I didn't need to learn to use that. No, I needed to learn how to fight in a melee, just in case I couldn't nail something from a distance with my jetpack's kinetic bursts. So, instead I'd retooled the thruster into a weapon, and built one into my left hand.

It didn't quite fit. I needed to make myself a chunky bracer to contain the generator, which meant I could only activate the kinetic pulses while I had the bracer on, but the exterior of the bracer was made of the hardest substance I could create, so it could block things fairly well, and I'd then tucked a series of small scalpels coated in sedative into the bracer itself, where I could draw them quickly with my right hand if I needed to.

As soon as I had the time I was going to streamline the thing, at the moment it was a gray monstrosity, but it was functional, and while I was wearing the bracer the output port on my palm was fully capable of acting as a thruster, or an adjustable kinetic pulse weapon.

Hookwolf selected three men, and they leaped into the ring. I blew one back out with a wide pulse of kinetic energy. I could have dampened the blow-back, got around Newton's third law by releasing the energy as light to be converted only when it struck someone. Instead I allowed it to spin me, planning to use my momentum to quickly turn to the next attacker.

That was a mistake. I misjudged the amount of force my hand was absorbing. My arm was nearly wrenched from it's socket, I spun twice, and fell in an undignified lump.

Then I was kicked.

Then I was punched.

I got off pretty lightly actually. One jaw fracture, but other than that, nothing but bruises.

Hookwolf called this fight once he decided that I was down, and all three men backed off instantly, even the one who had only just picked himself up and got back into the ring from my blast.

"Well little geek. How did your gadgets fare?" Hookwolf asked.

I shook my head to clear it, and stumbled to my feet.

"Not too bad, I think. I was the stupid one. Look's like I've got a lot to learn. I'll ask again, would you mind teaching me?"

Hookwolf looked me up and down. I pushed slightly at my cut lip with my tongue, making blood slowly trail down my chin. I liked being able to turn off pain. It made you look pretty badass without making you suffer for it.

"If you can take the lessons, you can learn." Hookwolf announced.

I felt my small reserve of energy. It had been empty when I came in. I smiled.

"Thanks, I'll be taking you up on that." I said.

There were a few howls of appreciation from the audience. I shook the hands of the men who had been fighting me, but stayed in the ring.

"I have something else to test before I go, if you don't mind."

Hookwolf shrugged.

"Your bruises. This is as good an entertainment as any." He told me.

I nodded. One way or another, I was going to have to use the Mayhem Protocol again. One day I'd be desperate enough to throw away my ability to reason in exchange for a combat advantage. Hell, I was planning on it.

Last time had been a disaster, but ignoring what had caused that disaster wouldn't change that it happened, and it wouldn't help me stop it from happening again. I'd revised it a bit, tried to give my moral compass a guiding hand in how the Protocol fought, but I still didn't have much data at all from the Protocol in action. I knew what it should do, but the protocol was designed to be adaptive, organic in nature and very capable of growth.

I made sure my new, extremely tough, mask was recording everything, and sending that recording over a hacked cell network to my personal server.

"Right, this time, if you could keep people coming until I fall, or until five minutes is up, I'd appreciate it. I won't really be… myself, it's… well it's a sort of combat personality I'm working on. You'll see. Mayhem. Objectives: Survival, non-lethal and non-permanent take-downs to everyone who enters the ring. Five minutes. Activate."

Jurric · Mar 19, 2016

I reached for a splint as I examined the broken leg. The break was quite clean, a bit of bone glue, a bit of cell grown formula, something to take down the swelling, and the world would have one more E88 skinhead walking just fine in three days.

I replayed the video of my fight, matched one of the faces on the recording to the one in front of me. Mayhem had nicked him with a scalpel, a simple, casual flick of his wrist, then casually fired a burst from the kinetic thruster in his palm into the man's shinbone to keep him down while the sedative worked it's way through his system. Ouch.

At least I'd been smart enough to bring medical supplies this time. The car that drove me here was filled with enough tinkertech medical gear to start a small hospital. On the other hand… I glanced over at Cricket. I think Mayhem had the medical supplies in mind when he defined 'non-permanent.'

I'd already reviewed the footage of my fight with Cricket. Mayhem didn't seem affected by her ability to disorient opponents, which wasn't surprising. He was fully capable of ignoring my inner ear, and calculating balance based of visual input or simple math. Still, her skill with her blades and the damage to my eardrums had apparently been enough to piss him off, judging by the broken humerus in her left arm, broken radius and ulna in her right arm, broken tibia in her left leg, and dislocated patella in her right leg.

I'd already put casts on her, and the painkillers I'd prescribed had a very strong calming effect, so hopefully she wouldn't try to kill me as soon as she woke up.

At the very least the leg casts would give me a chance to get away.

There were a few other injured gang members, but with the leg of the man I'd literally been standing on fixed, I instead fast forwarded the footage of the fight to try and figure out if Hookwolf and Stormtiger were going to be as pissed as Cricket.

I knew I hadn't been able to beat Hookwolf, because I woke up with a bunch of whirling razorblades in my face, but when I told him that I was awake again, and that the fight was over, I hadn't really been able to read his grunts one way or the other. At least he'd changed back to his more human form. Stormtiger had also been standing, but he'd been swaying slightly, and he was now over by the sturdy crate that was doing double duty as a bar, drinking a bottle of something cold and probably alcoholic.

Let's see… looked like after I took down Cricket both Hookwolf and Stormtiger had agreed to 'give me a real challenge' and entered the ring together. There had only been thirty seconds left on the clock at that point, so it wasn't surprising that there wasn't a clear victor. Hookwolf was able to grow metal over his flesh quickly enough to block Mayhem's use of the scalpels, the tazer had been out of charge by then, and Stormtiger managed to maintain a protective shield of air whenever Mayhem threw a scalpel his way, but Mayhem still had access to the kinetic pulse weapon built into my left hand, and he'd been using it.

Hmm, looked like Mayhem had managed to nearly take down Stormtiger, he just hadn't been able to make it stick with Hookwolf after him. One shot that Stormtiger had only partially dodged did dislocate Stormtiger's arm… I threw a glance at the man, who had nearly finished draining a bottle of beer. He'd popped the arm back in himself, an amateur job, I'd need to give him something to prevent future stiffness. Probably best to leave that for later, I had a lot more broken limbs in need of attention first.

My own body was holding up surprisingly well. Sprained and strained tendons, ligaments and muscles, numerous fractures in my right hand when I punched someone with more than the recommended level of force, but I think that Mayhem was getting better at preserving me. Nothing I couldn't fix within a day or so, or work through while my pain was set this low.

Oh joy, Hookwolf was coming back. I look up at him, but kept working, arraying the sprints, tying them to his ankle. I gestured to the end of the man's leg.

"Would you mind tugging on his foot please?" I asked.

Hookwolf grunted, tugged on the ankle gently while I kept my grip on the knee. I kept up pressure until the bone snapped back into place, bound the top of the leg quickly, then injected the correct chemicals. One down, seven to go. Mayhem seemed to like the 'sleepy slash' and 'leg blast' formula.

"Pretty good fight." Hookwolf said eventually, almost begrudgingly.

"Thanks." I told him. My power certainly seemed to like it.

"You've got the instinct, the savagery, but there's too much… what's that word? Where you don't do anything but what you need to do?"

"Um… economy of motion?" I asked.

"Doesn't have anything to do with money, but maybe. When you moved, it wasn't to do anything except attack. I don't think you threw a feint in the whole fight, and it wasn't just that, you didn't circle your target for a better angle, you didn't move on the spot to warm up muscles, nothing but attack attack attack. I still got a bit I can teach you." Hookwolf said.

Mayhem was adaptive, it would probably learn on it's own with a bit of time. Still, I don't think I could safely let Mayhem out anywhere else. This wasn't really a controlled environment, but it was close. I just needed to be careful with how I phrased my commands.

"Um, thanks. I'll definitely take you up on that." I most certainly would, I'd be able to unlock anti-master mental modifications in a little over a week, provided I did this every night…

Which I wouldn't be able to do without Othala's co-operation. I was a miracle worker, but I wasn't that good at fixing myself back up. I wouldn't be comfortable doing this again till the day after tomorrow, maybe Thursday if some of the people who had been fighting me wanted a second round.

"Those words you say, when you want to turn on the murder machine, " Ouch. Not the term I would use for it, if only because it was disturbingly accurate, "they're a weakness. You can't say all that in the middle of a fight." Hookwolf pointed out.

"I know, but they're a bit like the safety on a gun." I told him. "It's like… I could trigger the Mayhem Protocol with my neural implant, but if I did then it could become a case of not thinking of pink elephants, and I could trigger it by accident. The Mayhem Protocol and the lethal settings on my kinetic pulse weapons all require voice activation, so I can't just receive some sort of shock, and pull the trigger accidentally, as it were. So I have to say the words. I can shorten it, sort of, you know how there's… I can't say it, but a bit of setup where I describe what I want it to do?"

Hookwolf nodded.

"Well, I can say that before I go into a fight, set some parameters, and then it will activate as soon as I say, 'activate.' Pretty simple."

"So when you just fought is that you, or isn't it?" Hookwolf asked.

He actually seemed to respect what Mayhem was capable of, so saying it wasn't wouldn't be my best bet. I did see myself as separate from the Protocol, but…

"Try to think of it as me, if I exchanged my higher thought functions for a combat thinker power." I told him. He looked a little confused, but he nodded, and helped me set another bone.

I zoned out a little, medical technology wasn't strictly speaking my forte, but I could fix broken limbs in my sleep regardless. Instead of focusing on the carnage I'd caused, I looked through the next few options on my tech trees. Let's see, I wanted to continue up my Neural Enhancement branch, and it was currently my highest branch, holding the most complicated technology I had currently unlocked.

I spotted something vaguely familiar, I think I'd seen it in a few other trees and branches. A micro-matter-manipulator. Not anything to do with Neural Enhancement specifically, just a tool needed to make the next stage of neural implant.

A very versatile tool though, I would need it for almost any tree eventually, and I had just enough energy to buy it. I was still inspecting the new schematic while I fixed the final broken bone into place. Hookwolf picked up on my annoyance.

"Something bothering you?" He asked me.

I shook my head and sighed.

"Sort of. I just had an idea for a really, really cool tinkertech thing, but now that I think about it, it's outside my budget. I could make something that gives a permanent anti-master effect, but I'd need a couple of million to build it."

Not counting whatever the implant itself ended up costing. I was still a long way from buying anti-master implant tech, this was literally just one of the tools I would need. Hookwolf whistled, and smirked.

"Heh, well, have fun convincing Kaiser you need the money. Might be better to shelve the idea for now. Chinks and Merchants are blessedly free of fucking Masters." Hookwolf said with a shrug.

I nodded, and began treating myself. There were a few chemicals that could increase the rate at which fractured bones healed, the only real problem was keeping the bones in my hand completely still while the fractures re-knit. This was going to be a fairly complicated cast.

I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, and I was caught off guard when Cricket sat up.

Whoops, I sort of meant to have left by now. That's the trouble with that sedative, fast acting, but it works it's way out of the system too quickly.

She looked around, saw me, looked at the casts on her legs, and unsteadily levered herself to her feet. Which was impressively stupid considering both her arms were in casts as well. She fumbled around and found her throat mike, putting it to her electo-larynx. I could upgrade that pretty easily.

"You. Mayhem!" She yelled.

I wondered if I should make a run for it. She managed to do the intimidation thing almost as well as Hookwolf, despite my lack of fear and the state of her body.

"Um, yes?" I said, working quickly. I couldn't move just yet, needed to finish wrapping my hand first, or I'd loose dexterity until I re-broke things.

"You, you dance really well." She told me, swaying unsteadily.

If I had eyes, I would have blinked.

"Um, thank you?" I said.

"Stormtiger, he dances well too, but he likes pretty girls, not girls like me. Do you like girls like me?" Cricket asked.

In my desire not to be killed for breaking her limbs, I might have given her too much morphine. She had managed to pick up one of her kama, and she was waving it around happily. Why? Why would she say that while waving a small scythe at me?

"I…"

My mind went blank. My power showed me a blueprint for a knife-proof formal suit, and I got the bizarre feeling that it wanted me to spend more time around the crazy, scythe wielding woman. Probably for the additional conflict. That feeling did not help my mental state.

In the end the way she was standing on a broken leg was the thing that popped into my mind, so I drew one of my two remaining scalpels and walked over to her, carefully nicking a tiny vein in her arm just above the cast. The sedative was potent, that was all that I needed to do.

"As your doctor, I advise strict bed rest. No dancing for at least three days." I told her as she collapsed.

Then I ran the fuck away.

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