H+ Mayhem (Worm)

[Jurric]

"Are you sure that you want to do this?" Chief Director Costa-Brown asked Miss Militia.

"I don't want to, but I feel that I need to." Miss Militia told her, pacing back and forth in front of the camera.

"What if I told you that Piggot is under assessment, and is likely to be reassigned?" Costa-Brown asked.

"I'm sorry, I don't think that would change anything. I've looked into the other directors, and I don't think there's a single one who doesn't see this as a war. They think in terms of tactical advantage, they see us as soldiers, resources, threats. This isn't a war, these are people, people with problems. Our job isn't to fight, it's to help people."

"If this is about Shadow Stalker and Mayhem, you should know that I support Piggot's decisions. Not her incompetence in letting Shadow Stalker act out so violently, not her inability to hold a tinker with no tools or tech to back him up, her decisions. Shadow Stalker was a potent deterrent to the local gangs, and a bio-tinker luring the Slaugherhouse Nine into a population center is something we needed to stop. Mayhem had to be arrested, and while the arrest wasn't handled well, that doesn't change the fact that we could have helped him. We could have moved him somewhere safe, and made sure that we didn't learn the full scope of his abilities the hard way." Costa-Brown said.

"It wasn't that." Miss Militia said. "Mayhem proved he would never have fit in as a hero. It was because I finally had time to think. Time to remember. There are a lot of reasons I'm leaving Director. The way that I've seen the Protectorate operate in recent years, the way that New Wave has been treated for trying to maintain independence, and how kindly they have treated me in return. Our tactics, our morals… I don't want to leave, I want to look at all these petty things and let them slide. I want to just look at how stable we are here, compared to Africa or Japan, and think that this is good enough. But that isn't my job. My job is to make things better, and to do that I need to warn the Protectorate that their path is flawed. My letters have been ignored, my resignation will not be."

"You believe that everyone should be like New Wave, accountable, open superheroes without government backing?" Costa-Brown asked.

"No. I think that their path is also flawed. There is such a thing as being too idealistic. I simply feel that it is less flawed than what we have."

"And you're led to feel this way by a few mistakes, a mishandled Ward, and a general atmosphere of hostility?" Costa-Brown said, her eyes narrowing.

"No. Not just that. Other things as well. I have a perfect memory Director. A voice can be changed, eyes can wear contact lenses, but you never did manage to find a uniform as durable as you were. Glimpses seen during Endbringer battles that other people can barely recall, I can remember in perfect clarity." Miss Militia said, slowly stopping her pacing, and turning to face the screen.

"I watched you figure that out as a Ward under my care. You never asked, I cannot explain it to you without compromising secrets above your pay-grade. Why bring it up now?" Alexandria said softly.

"Because you were my role model. You were the only member of the Protectorate who spoke enough Kurdish to explain things to me. You taught me to fight. You taught me to do what is right. When I asked myself, 'what would Alexandria do,' this is what came to mind."

Director Costa-Brown frowned, and rubbed her eyes.

"Do what you need to Hannah. We'll be sorry to see you go."

The screen went black, and Miss Militia let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

It was hard to leave what she had built for herself behind, a career, a pathway to the future. She wasn't even sure if it was the right choice. She'd done a lot of thinking, lying crippled on the hospital bed. Thinking about the future, about the past, about the things she had seen and the things she had done. She'd been looking for a cause to fight for, something she could believe in again, with the same fire and zeal she'd had when she began her career as a hero.

And then a young healer had come along, bearing an almost tangible weight. There was something there, something a hero might be able to fix. Someone she might be able to save.

There were other reasons of course. Gratitude, for starters. Panacea had saved her life twice. Once when she stopped the stumps of her arms bleeding. Once when she used the spare bio-mass the hospital provided to restore her missing limbs. What she'd been telling Alexandria was far from a lie, but it also wasn't the whole truth.

Costa-Brown must have been busy. She had called late, after the going away party, which her other team members bar Armsmaster had attended, and even he had sent a card and a bulletproof costume. There had been recriminations, Assault had tried to convince Battery to leave as well, citing 'better scenery' and had been punched for his trouble. He wasn't off probation yet anyway, New Wave wouldn't have him.

Piggot was waiting for her in what had once been her office, and Miss Militia stiffened. She'd been trying to avoid this. For a second she considered leaving her personal effects, a few pictures of herself in costume, and a small statue of Lady Liberty that the Wards had given her as a present, but avoiding a confrontation was one thing, running away was another.

Miss Militia nodded to Piggot as she entered, picked up the pictures and put them into a cardboard box. Piggot spoke as she reached for the statue.

"The Wards will miss you. Vista especially." Piggot told her.

"I will also miss them." Miss Militia said softly.

"Your resignation letter was quite clear, but I wish you'd given me more warning. The press conference is going to be a nightmare, and you haven't discussed it with our PR team yet."

"I won't be discussing it with them at all. I know what I am going to say."

"You are legally required to talk with them. It was in your contract."

"I am required to pay a fine of two thousand dollars for breach of that clause. You'll find the check on your desk." Miss Militia said, closing the door quickly as she left.

It was a long walk out from the rig, through the undersea tunnel. Miss Militia's car had been a company one. She was still looking for a replacement.

Sarah Pelham was waiting for her at the end of the tunnel, just outside the restricted entrance. Miss Militia took her mask off regretfully.

"Did everything go well Hannah?" Sarah asked her.

"Quite well. My name isn't Hannah though."

"Oh?" Sarah asked,

"My name is Hana. It always has been. It is a small thing to 'Americanize' it, too petty too worry about a different stress on one syllable, a few changed letters. Small things, when people are dying, and children are suffering."

Sarah unlocked her car, and Hana placed her box into it in silence, then opened the door to get into the passenger seat.

"It is a small thing, but… sometimes, if action is not taken, small things can become big." Hana said softly.

"Everything starts small." Sarah agreed. "Stopping something horrible in the bud is safer, easier… not quite sure what you're talking about specifically though."

"Hmm… To be honest, neither am I." Hana said, shaking her head and smiling in bemusement. "Sorry. I got a little introspective there."

"Hey, you're only just out of hospital. Having your arms cut off is a pretty life changing experience, even if they are grown back. You're allowed to take some time to get your head on straight."

"Thank you. How is Vista's emancipation going?"

"Quite well. It's not Carol's area of expertise at all of course, but some bigwig in the construction industry offered to have his legal team help out in exchange for a few patrols in his area. Apparently the Merchants have been harassing some of the Fortress Construction workers."

 

[Jurric]

"I have a targeting solution." I told Victor. He snorted in amusement, not taking his eye from the scope of his rifle.

"Same here. Only I didn't spend last night watching Sci-Fi, so I'm not going to call it that. You know the rules, hold your fire."

I did so, watching Stormtiger slash a couple of bombs out of the air, and Alabaster tank a bomb to the face. He briefly turned to some sort of green crystal, then snapped back to his normal, pale Changer self.

This was a probing strike, the ABB had a new tinker as well, and we were going to see what she was made of.

"Not a lot of non-lethal stuff." I noted, as the sidewalk turned to ash in some sort of controlled mini-nova of fire.

"Yeah. Chink bitch will slip up one of these days, and then… Boom." Victor said, jerking his gun slightly to indicate what he meant.

"Hasn't she been telling everyone that she hid bombs around the city, and that they'll detonate if she's killed?" I asked.

"Yeah, but we've been on the look out. She'd have a lot of trouble putting any in our territory. I'm sure there's some, but a bullet through her brain isn't going to end us. That bomb that produced the red mist, and the mist melted the car, what was that?"

I zoomed my mask's sensors in on the slowly dissipating cloud.

"I… have no idea actually." I said in surprise. "Not organic though, and not nanites… some sort of chemical compound. Sorry."

Victor sighed.

"Right. Not your specialty I guess. Any obvious weaknesses? How many of these bombs could you take out with an EMP?"

"Nearly none. They're very well made. I don't think she has an easy time working outside her specialty though. The grenade launcher she's using to throw them, it's completely standard. No modifications I can see."

Alabaster stepped on some sort of proximity mine, which blew his ragged carcases into the air, he landed fifty meters down the street, reset, and started walking forward again. Stormtiger stopped advancing, content just to swat the grenades Bakuda was shooting out of the air.

"She could just not need to modify it. That's a MGL 140 six shot grenade launcher. Lightweight, easy to handle and reload. It doesn't get much better."

I snorted.

"Lightweight? She can barely lift it. I'm not a weapons tinker or anything, but even I could mix up an alloy to make that twice as easy to carry."

"Reducing the weight to much would give you all sorts of problems with recoil." Victor said, sounding slightly offended. He liked his guns, and he felt that high quality military engineering beat tinkertech for reliability any day. He was probably right, but reliability wasn't everything.

We watched as a couple of idiotic ABB gang bangers decided to join in, and were quickly cut down by Stormtiger's razor sharp wind blasts.

"You know… the bombs that Stormtiger blows back at her aren't detonating." Victor mused.

"Yeah. Probably remote detonation. I'm not seeing anything to indicate that the bombs themselves are smart, or have programming beyond going boom." I told him. "I'd have to take one of the bombs apart to be sure though, should we try to collect a dud or something?"

"No, I don't think we can beat a bomb tinker at her own game like that. It won't be safe to defuse them. Still, remote detonation could be a weakness. Could you make something to interfere with the signal?"

I thought about it, signal jamming was in the espionage tree, but I hadn't unlocked it yet, and I wasn't sure that it would be worth the week an a half of energy that breaking into that section of the tree would require.

"Maybe. My mask records most of the Electro-magnetic spectrum, I'll take those recordings and analyze them later, see what sort of frequencies she's using. I might be able to do something, might not. Again, not really my specialty."

Victor nodded.

"It's rarely that easy. See what you can do. How does she control the explosions though? I'm not seeing a detonator."

I zoomed in further with my mask.

"… Not sure. I'd do it with a neural or spinal implant, but if she has one of them I'm not seeing the signs. The mask covers her face, but you don't go in through the face, too many tiny muscles, and that is part of my specialty. She's either just as good as I am at working wet, or she hasn't put anything into her brain or nervous system."

"You sure? We have an informant in the ABB, and he says she detonates them with her brain."

"As sure as I can be, I mean, I have pretty good resolution on this mask, and she might be a brain Tinker, instead of a bomb Tinker, but I doubt it. She might have gone in through the forehead, but that's just stupid, you need at lease some access to the Cerebellum."

"You know your tech best I suppose. There's nothing on her hands that could be a detonator. You think she might have a spotter? She's acting as a decoy, and someone else is blowing the bombs for her?" Victor mused.

"That makes sense." I told him.

Victor pursed his lips, his eye still glued to the scope of his rifle.

"…No. She's a control freak, you can see it in the way she fights, how she was yelling at her yellow friends earlier. She'd never let someone else detonate her bombs, and they are her bombs. I'm not seeing any signs that it's a body double… One second." Victor put his hand to his earpiece, and fiddled with it, isolating the channel that Alabaster and Stormtiger were listening to. "Lee incoming, we're done for today, pull back."

I didn't hear the response, but Stormtiger released a final flurry of slashes, driving Bakuda behind a parked truck, and then blew himself backwards, collecting Alabaster on the way past and carrying both of them around the corner.

The two of us stayed in place. We hadn't fired, hadn't moved, we were nearly four blocks away, and as far as I could tell no one had spotted us, camped as we were on the third floor of an abandoned warehouse. We were supposed to interfere if Alabaster and Stormtiger had trouble disengaging, but it looked like we wouldn't need to. Lee didn't seem to want to give chase.

"I think I got it." Victor said, still watching Bakuda through his rifle. "When she dodged just then nothing detonated. She probably could have detonated a couple of bombs between herself and Stormtiger for cover, but she couldn't do that and move, not easily. Something on her feet. Maybe her boots detect programmed toe movement or something. It could be that the move just caught her by surprise, but if you're right about no tinkertech brain reading bullshit, then it basically has to be the toes. She wasn't wearing gloves."

"I'd go with sub-dermal sensors in the fingers next, but I'm not seeing signs of that either, so yeah, some sort of scanner in the boots, or something on or in the toes to trigger the bombs." I told Victor. He nodded, and started packing up the rifle as Lee and Bakuda got into a car and left. We'd accomplished both our objectives. The ABB stash house had burned down from the Molotovs that some grunts had thrown before everything began, and we'd found out a lot about how Bakuda fought.

And the only thing we lost was a couple of foot soldiers to Bakuda's bombs. Acceptable casualties, for the E88 and for me. I wasn't going to get all broken up over the deaths of a few gang members, even if I had been fighting with one of them just last night.

Victor and I sat down quietly, waiting for the fuss to die down before our ride arrived to drive us back to safe territory. I could fly if I had to, and carry one passenger, but it would be best if we could avoid notice.

I glanced at Victor, who was reading a magazine calmly. At first I'd been wary around him. If any of the Empire were going to catch onto my future plans, he would be the one. He'd taken a lot of skills over the years, including the analytical sort, the skills to ferret out secrets easily.

At first I'd relied on avoiding direct conversation, and my espionage skills, but that was only a stopgap.

I still hadn't quite developed the anti-master technology I wanted, but my progress through the Neural Augmentation branch had allowed me to made a few adjustments to help me control myself. Firstly I'd finally managed to sync my emotion control up to my neural chip. Basically, I gave myself conscious control over my own emotions and feelings, allowing me to mentally adjust what I was feeling in real time. I'd been feeling real disgust when I looked at Bakuda earlier. Later, when I met Kaiser, I'd be feeling respect. I'd also put together a program to control micro-expressions, but that wasn't quite finished yet, I had the know how, I just needed another day or so to complete the programing.

I'd have it finished already if Rune hadn't insisted on dragging me out of my lab every other day.

"This initiation thing I have tomorrow… any advice on it?" I asked.

"Don't worry. It's easy. You'll be introduced to a few Gesellschaft people via teleconference, you'll beat up some filth, and then there's a party. Even Alabaster managed it, and he was still suicidal at the time." Victor said encouragingly.

"I hear rumors I had to kill someone?" I asked.

"Nah. That's Hookwolf's club. You're a bit young for that, and not many of us go that path." Victor said reassuringly.

"I guess that's not so bad then." I said, turning my nervousness down another notch. "There's something else, I've got a meeting with Kaiser afterward, a budget meeting. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to give a good presentation? I have a rather expensive project I want him to finance."

"What do you want to build?" Victor asked.

"A micro-fabricator. The name is a bit of a misnomer, it would be the size of a building, with several machines generating the energy fields needed to manipulate matter at the molecular level. I'm getting a lot of ideas on how to make things, but I can't work that small with normal tools. This could make those tools."

Victor scratched his chin.

"Guess that's the bane of Tinkers, limited by what you have available. Any idea how much it would cost?"

"Not really, I'm still getting ideas on how to make it, improve it. I thought it might be a couple of million, but I'm starting to figure out how to make some of the more expensive components myself, so the price is dropping. If I had a year or two I could probably make it on my current budget, but I don't think I want to wait that long." I told him.

"Really? Sounds interesting. What sort of things do you need this micro-fabricator to make?"

"Anti-master technology, hyper efficient electronics, genetic tweaks to existing genomes… that's actually the only stuff I've come up with at the moment, but there would be more, the fabricator is designed to be ridiculously versatile." I said, trying not to get to exited about just how much potential something like that would have.

"Well, those things sound fairly impressive, but I wouldn't say that any of them are absolutely vital right now. If you can, write up a list of the things you think this fabricator can build. Make sure that you write them in the order of what will most impress someone like Kaiser, but stick something good on the end of the list as well, to give him a good parting impression. Don't try to undersell the cost, in fact add a bit on to what you think it's going to be, just in case things go over budget. Do you have some sort of preliminary schematic or design you can show him? Or a plan for construction? If it's the size of a building that's a lot of work, and if you run into problems halfway, it's a lot of sunken effort and cost."

I nodded.

"I'll try to make one by tomorrow. In fact… "

I took out a notebook and started writing. I'd need to leave some extra space around the energy field generators, just in case I needed to start manipulating more exotic forms of energy at the molecular scale…

Victor went back to his magazine, flipped through a few pages, grew bored, and then a slow smile crept across his face.

"So… you and Cricket. I heard you made her a new throat thing. You've got a thing for scars huh?" He asked.

I groaned.

"I was hoping it would stop her from killing me after I broke all four of her limbs." I told him with a sigh.

It was good work, capable of producing sound in a variety of voices, although for some reason she preferred the electronic ones. I'd only been able to convince her to implant it because it would let her talk and fight at the same time. I hadn't even booby trapped it. Mostly because I'd been in a rush. I did have my other contingency.

"You know, she was thinking of changing her cape name to Murder there for a while. That would fit in quite well with yours. Murder and Mayhem. Trouble is, with Cricket, it's probably going to be on you to change your name. Let's see... how do you feel about Jiminy?"

"I have a tazer, and I will use it." I told him, poking him with my right hand.

"Just saying, Rune is going to be very upset when she finds out."

"That's it." I told him, reaching into my emergency medical bag and flipping open a small bottle. I made as if to throw it on Victor, and he held his hands up in surrender.

"Spare me, spare me your Tinker wrath." He said jokingly.

"…Since you asked nicely, fine." I said, putting the cap back onto the container. Victor snatched it.

"What does this actually do?" He asked, swirling the tiny bottle.

"Tinkertech hair growth formula." I told him.

Odd how that was in the Human Augmentation tree, but I suppose it would help to adapt a human more quickly to colder climates. The formula itself was nearly useless to me, but it had cost me almost no energy to unlock, and it had cheapened the cost of some organ growth technology a little higher up the tree.

Victor paused.

"But I'm not bald?"

"It doesn't need to work on the head." I told him, trying and failing to snatch the bottle back.

Victor started grinning. I tried to snatch the bottle from him again, and he held it over his head thoughtfully. I engaged the rocket boots, and he started juggling the container, always keeping it just out of my reach.

"You know, it's kind of traditional to have a little bit of hazing before the initiation…" Victor said thoughtfully.

…

The worst part was all the pictures Rune took before I managed to get rid of the neckbeard.

 

[Jurric]

I knocked as politely as possible, and waited for Kaiser to answer.

The initiation went… well. I think. I mean, it could have gone worse. The E88 had a sort of hold on me now, but not much more of one than they already possessed. I hadn't been forced to compromise the rules I set for myself more than I already had.

Remembering… enjoying it was… annoying. Still, I didn't attach that emotion to any particular act. I could think of it as enjoying fooling the E88. Nothing more. The poor guy would come out of the experience healthier than ever, once the bruises cleared up.

Kaiser's door opened with a click.

"Come in Mayhem." He said warmly.

Kaiser was charismatic, which was probably the most dangerous thing about him. Well, the most dangerous thing about him other than the fact that I had metal implanted in my brain, and he could grow spikes from it at any time.

"Did you enjoy the party last night?" Kaiser asked, blue eyes twinkling…

Ugh. Respect is a tricky emotion. I couldn't just record a panic attack or stick a thumb tack into my hand like I did to get readings for fear and pain respectively. I'd read an article about Miss Militia's press conference and used pictures of Dragon's drones to try and isolate the correct sections of the brain when I was setting up the program. Guess respect and admiration are very closely tied together. Either that or I had a thing for drones. I turned my respect down several notches…

"It wasn't bad." I said blandly.

I'd introduced myself to everyone of course, it had been an excellent opportunity to shake hands with almost the entirety of the Empire's elite. The time after that had been… less exciting. Kaiser had asked Theo to show me around the Empire's training facility and there was something… off about the boy. He suppressed everything. When he showed me the first aid station I started tinkering together a concoction that would inhibit emotional suppression. Didn't even realize what my hands were doing before Theo asked me what I was making. Very awkward. Probably hypocritical to, now that I thought about it.

"I realize that you're not used to our customs just yet, but I'm sure you'll catch on quickly." Kaiser told me.

There had been a lot of stuff flying over my head. I caught whispers of arranged marriages, shuffling around teams, some very complex family trees. Honestly I didn't want to figure it all out, it sounded like to much fuss for an organization I planned to leave anyway.

"Thanks, I'll try." I told him.

"Victor mentioned that you wanted to talk with me about additional funding?" Kaiser said genially.

"Yes. Um, here you go." I told him, handing over my designs, cost estimates, and a list of the things I'd probably be able to build with the micro-fabricator.

Kaiser dutifully read the whole thing, and I spent the time trying not to snatch the sheets from him to make corrections or upgrades to my designs. After a little while I gave up, took out my phone and started working on the micro-expressions software. If my suspicions were right about Armsmasters lie detector, I could use this to fool him the next time we met.

"I like what you have here Mayhem." Kaiser said eventually. "I certainly think it has potential. It's not an impossible amount of money or resources, but… I hope you understand, it is a very large investment, and for an untried Tinker new to both their power and our organization, it is a very high risk investment. I'd be happy to fund this device. But not now. Give yourself time to settle in, refine the design, and prove how useful your technology is, and I'm sure we can come to some sort of agreement."

I bit back my disappointment, nodded, and tried to think.

"So you want me to prove how useful my current technology could be, before making something better?" I asked.

"That is a large part of it, yes." Kaiser said evenly.

I had sort of expected this. Guess it was time to stop playing around.

"Very well. Then I would like your permission to start two projects. The first one is simple. I have developed a number of drugs and surgical procedures that can enhance the human body. Tinkertech steroids, sub-dermal mesh, bone bracing, implanted weapons… I can give anyone I want a Brute two rating, and a nasty surprise or two for anyone their fighting. I would like your permission to start enhancing volunteers from the Empire."

I was leading with my least favorite. Making these enhancements made me at least partially responsible for what those I enhanced did with their new-found power. The program would take a week or so to start up. I could mitigate that, pick and choose who I let into my program and who I kept out. Make sure I let in fighters, not killers, but there would be more deaths on my head, by the end of this.

But I thought the prize would be worth that price.

"Would this be dangerous?" Kaiser asked.

"Not at all. The people I would enhance would require maintenance, but not much. Most of my implanted stuff doesn't need to be taken out or re-worked. I can even make some tech tied directly into the central nervous system self healing."

"Who do you intend to enhance?" Kaiser asked.

"Whoever you send to me to enhance."

Except the bloodthirsty killers. Those might have 'unrecognized pre-existing medical conditions.' Well, pre-existing was stretching it, but I could probably get away with that excuse a couple of times. I didn't plan on having to do this for long.

Kaiser frowned, and nodded.

"All right. I'll pick some of my best men to see you tomorrow."

"Thursday if you don't mind. I still need to get the surgery set up." I told him.

"All right. You mentioned a second project."

"Right. The second project is one I actually expect to fail, I simply feel obligated to try. Are you familiar with the corona polentia and the gemma?" I asked Kaiser.

"I am. The parts of the brain associated with powers." Kaiser told me.

"My power appears to be some sort of bio-tinker specialty, possibly even a brain specialty, like Cranial. I don't get ideas when I look at scans of that part of the brain. I don't think I can Tinker with powers themselves, but I feel like I should at least take a look." I said, taking a second file out of my bag.

Kaiser took it from me, questioning me as he opened it.

"You want to experiment on a parahuman? I'm not sure that's something I can allow…"

He stared at the picture.

"I'm fairly sure she'd be a willing volunteer." I told him.

He was silent, rubbing his chin.

"She's very pale, so she sort of fits in, I might be able to give her control over her powers. Recruit her."

"The Krasue is a Taiwanese myth." Kaiser said absently.

I had not expected Kaiser of all people to know that. In fact I hadn't known that. Why would Kaiser have that sort of multicultural knowledge?

"I could probably rig something to make her look more human as well. Shouldn't be to hard." I said.

"Can you contain her?" Kaiser asked.

"Of course I can. The place they're holding her is hardly the Birdcage. She can barely bend ordinary steel, and I know how to make Tinker tech alloys that are significantly stronger."

Kaiser nodded thoughtfully.

"I'll have to think about this, consider the matter shelved for now. Is there anything else?"

I nodded.

"There is a more practical matter. I have a few alloys I'd like to make in bulk, but the process is time consuming, they are metal, if you could use your power."

Kaiser nodded.

"Of course. I wouldn't mind something in return though. Something lightweight and strong, that I can use to make my own armor."

I smiled, took a few flakes of metal out of my backpack and started explaining their properties. There wasn't really a metallurgy tree to my power, but I had some high grade metals designed not to degrade inside the human body, and a couple of ultra lightweight and quite strong metals from the beginning of the aviation tree.

Eventually I felt comfortable enough to ask something that had been bugging me for a while.

"You can create large amounts of any metal from thin air, right?" I asked Kaiser. He nodded.

"Of course."

"So you can create almost unlimited amounts of precious metals?" I asked.

"I can. Unfortunately there is this rather annoying… well simply put Economic Kill Orders exist, and I was warned early in my career that I would get one, should I use my powers in that way." Kaiser said, looking slightly uncomfortable about the topic.

"Could you supply other Tinkers instead?"

"Too close too risk." Kaiser said, a note of real annoyance in his tone. I didn't press further.

***​

I didn't really realize what I had done until I got back to my lab, normalized my emotions, and re-played the recording I took with my mask.

I hadn't gone into that meeting intending to offer so much support to the E88. I'd been willing to augment some people, but not the people Kaiser picked. I'd been willing to work with Kaiser, but not just give him everything he wanted.

Ugh.

But I needed the E88. I needed a lab. I needed money. I wanted their help fighting the Nine…

I sighed, got back to work. Spinal implant, micro-scale muscle control… The spinal implant needed to shut down for the software updated, leaving me paralyzed from the neck down for the four minutes the update would take to go through.

I stared at myself in the computer screen, pondering the future. It was whim more than anything that made me say it.

"Mayhem Protocol. Objectives: Survival, Tell me what you think I should do. Thirty seconds."

I woke back up, blinked, replayed the mask's recording to see how Mayhem had responded to that objective.

Mayhem had slowly turned his neck to face the blank computer screen, and smiled, a rictus that pulled his lips back from his teeth.

"Pathetic Creator. You think to tame the wolves to fight against the Prince of Knives? They are ill suited to the task. Their teeth are dull. Their claws are not filled with poison, but with rot. Their stale breath seeps into your nose and your ears, weakening you. Their leader thinks he is a knight of white, but his cowardice is plain. Let me out. Let me feast on them, and I will grow strong enough to fight the Prince for you."

I looked around. The room was empty. Victor had stopped watching me while I was at the clinic. I played the recording again.

I hadn't even known that Mayhem could talk.

 

[Jurric]

Two hours later I was pouring over the code for the Mayhem Protocol, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong.

My best idea right now was to ask Mayhem itself, but I was reluctant to do that. For obvious reasons.

It took me nearly an hour to figure out that Mayhem had adjusted my fear levels. Subtly, and fear felt natural after watching yourself talk like that, so I nearly hadn't noticed it.

Mayhem had done, in my estimation, three 'impossible things' in one brief remonstration.

1. He had somehow managed to learn how to talk.
2. He had demonstrated sapience, or at least higher reasoning.
3. He had demonstrated a vastly different personality.

Mayhem, the actual thing itself, was actually a fairly small program stored in my neural implant. Small is relative, a couple of gigabytes of code is quite significant, but not nearly complex enough to hold an actual mind…

Or was it? I wasn't an AI tinker, I had very few AI blueprints, and all of them were near the tops of their respective trees.

I opened up the block of code that made up Mayhem, and started trying to make sense of it. Of course it was vastly different from what I originally wrote. Mayhem was self improving. If it accomplished an objective it used my brain and power to improve itself, if it was struggling, or failed, it would re-write itself to solve the problem.

The Mayhem Protocol had been one of the first things available when I opened up the Neural Enhancement branch of the Human Augmentation tree, but even now, with all the extra energy invested into that tree, I hadn't been able to fully understand it.

Mayhem wasn't an AI, at least not in any traditional sense. It should just be me, but with everything non-essential to objectives that I set stripped away, and re-purposed into processing power for that objective. The human brain was both a powerful number cruncher, and flexible in a way that almost boggles the imagination. It's also really good at running incredibly fast simulations.

Say you take someone's sandwich, and they confront you about it. Your mind can take all the information you have on your victim, process it, determine how they will respond, and then tell you what to do in that brief second before your silence becomes damning. Mayhem was supposed to be like that, but optimized for combat. It wasn't supposed to be this… creepy… thing.

OK, let's break it down. What did Mayhem do first?

He called me 'Pathetic Creator?' No, even before that, he smiled.

Mayhem shouldn't smile. I'd only just taught the program to feint, Mayhem had no use for anything that didn't fulfill it's objectives. Could it perform social engineering? Possibly. It was built on my brain, it had access to the Espionage tree, just like I did, it could access my memories for solutions to problems. I had taught it to feint, it only needed one example of how that could fool an opponent.

So when it insulted me, it thought that would help it achieve it's objectives… which was to answer my question? What had that question been exactly? I re-wound my mask. 'Tell me what you think I should do?'

It should have been too open ended for a direct answer. No, wait, there had been another objective. Survival. I included that as a standard precaution, because the Mayhem Protocol was designed to only perform objectives. If someone started shooting at me while the Protocol was active, it would only dodge or seek cover if it would otherwise be unable to complete it's other objectives.

Then there was the reason I named it Mayhem in the first place. The very first time I activated it, with absolutely no orders, it had trashed my room. Just thrown things around, punched walls, broke a bit of my old equipment. I assumed it was running the learning algorithms physically, learning to move and attack in a three dimensional environment, but I hadn't been sure.

And looking at the code was getting me nowhere. I'd need to run it, unpack it, watch it in motion to fully understand it, and it was designed to run on a fully sapient brain. I could grow one, but that posed interesting moral quandaries that I really didn't want to go into. I could record my own brain, but that was going to be awkward, because I couldn't really direct the code, fiddle with it or otherwise poke it while it was active.

I took a deep breath, and started setting up a program on the spinal chip that would inhibit my movement again. Then I programmed a few safeties into the neural chip, making it reset my emotional state to what I would describe as my pre-Tinker baseline when the spinal chip let me move again. Then locking the program so it would take more than thirty seconds to remove.

Finally, I was back where I started. Time to test a theory.

"Mayhem. Objectives: Tell me what I should do? Time, thirty seconds. Activate."

I woke back up, waited for my blocks to wear off, and then checked the mask.

This time there had been less of a response. I'd simply sat in the chair, stared at my computer monitor. Eventually my mouth moved. One word.

"Fight."

My face had been blank the whole time.

So… why had removing survival from the command made such a huge difference? The first time, Mayhem had been complex. There was extensive use of metaphor. I'd have bet money he could pass the Turing test. He'd been deliberately terrifying. So why was that important to my survival?

I could understand it perhaps, if there had been no response this time. The survival command was received and interpreted, and for some reason the program thought that it's little melodrama would help me survive. The question was simply ignored because it wasn't an objective, the Mayhem Protocol hadn't been designed to answer questions, and my tech was still tech. If it wasn't designed to do something it didn't do it. That was how technology worked. No 'robots turning on humanity,' just robots that did what they were told to do, or did nothing, because that's what happens when the wrong orders are given.

That still raised the question of why Mayhem thought I needed to hear that to survive, but I could maybe see that happening. It was an organic system, the robot analogy wasn't perfect.

But the second time I asked, without the survival clause, it had still given me an answer. In a way, it could even be called the same answer, in a slightly different form. If I was correct in my interpretation Mayhem wanted me to fight the Empire, use the conflict to upgrade myself, and him. He thought that was how to 'Survive.' He'd been able to put a fair amount of emotion and abstract thought into his urging, although I wouldn't say that it actually made me want to fight the Empire. So points for creativity, but none for social manipulation.

Unless he was saying that I was being corrupted by the Empire. I had tried to give Mayhem my morals. A sort of sub-set of very objectives, always present, even when they weren't mentioned, that could be overwritten by actual orders…

If it had just listed off my morals as 'what I should do' that might have made a bit of sense, they were in there, although I wasn't sure just how much of an effect they had. But instead it said 'fight.'

Had that come from me? From some sort of primitive instinct that the Protocol didn't fully suppress? Was that what my moral code was? I doubt it.

No there was something else, something influencing my brain, and when the Protocol didn't have much else running, that effect was more plain, it was able to give the Protocol priorities that I hadn't specifically assigned. In this case, the priority to 'fight.'

I looked at the images of my brain on the computer monitor, and tried to remember why I brought them up. Ah, that was right, the Mayhem Protocol had been acting up, and I needed to figure out why.

I dismissed the brain scans, looked at my empty cup of coffee, and texted Stacy to make me a new one. Looked like I'd have to go through the code line by line, even if I didn't understand some of it.

Stacy came in, smiling that persistent Cheshire grin, and put a cup down on the table for me.

"Mayhem, you do know that it's six AM?" She said.

"It can't be. I only just came back from meeting Kaiser a few hours ago." I said. "Besides, if it was that late, you'd have gone home."

"I did. Mom looked after you till five AM, and called me back for the early shift."

I checked my computer. I'd been a little bit lost in the code, but it hadn't been that long.

"Guess I won't get much sleep tonight then. I need to solve this." I told her, taking a deep sip of the coffee.

Well blast. She'd slipped one of my sedatives into it.

***

I woke up in bed, which was at least better than pulling my face off a keyboard.

I lay there, looking at the ceiling for a long time, my mind chasing loops of thought. Eventually I decided I'd wasted enough time.

"Stacy, you have until I am capable of moving to get me a real cup of coffee, or you do not want to know what I will do your brain."

I rolled out of bed. Fought with myself internally for a few minutes, and then started my exercise routine. Over three weeks of a Tinkertech diet and exercise regime had helped me immensely, even if I wasn't following my powers advice on sleep patterns. I was now at the point where, even without my technology. I was almost a match for one unpowered, unarmed gang member.

Not actually impressive, but not too bad considering where I started.

From there, it was time for more study.

I was in my lab, replaying two files on my mask, trying to make sense of them when Victor came to visit me.

The first was the Mayhem Protocol, trapped in a chair and given ten seconds to fulfill the objective, 'tell me what you are.'

It had responded. 'The Mayhem Protocol.'

The next was the same protocol, still trapped in a chair, and given ten seconds to fulfill two objectives. 'Tell me what you are' and 'survive.'

It had responded. 'I am what will rise from your ashes.'

Apparently my survival depended on melodrama. I made a mental note to come back to the Mayhem issue before I tried to use it again as Victor entered the lab, and another mental note to find Stacy and teach her how to brew a proper cup of coffee. Then rose.

I had a breakout to plan.

 

[Jurric]

"You know, I really thought there would be more involved in breaking into a parahuman containment center than showing up at night." I said, trying to peer through the tinted window.

Victor got out of the car, moved to a black box on the fence and spent a minute cutting it open and splicing a few wires.

"For most people there would be, but you hired the best." Victor said casually. I got out out of the car, and he crouched, hands together to give me a boost over the fence. It was quite high, but the top wasn't barbed or anything. Just a typical, chain link fence. I ignored his hands and activated my jetpack to fly over.

"Hired? You mean you're not doing this out of a sense of brotherly camaraderie?" I asked him nervously.

Sleep had helped. I had finally understood what the Mayhem Protocol had been trying to teach me. Or part of it anyway. Fear improved my power. I gained energy more quickly when I was scared.

I still hadn't fully enabled my fear, but I was letting it run at a low level. No fear past a certain intensity, so I couldn't start getting panic attacks again, but I was feeling a bit nervous about breaking into a government facility in the dead of night.

"Nope. Didn't I tell you that I want to keep these grenades?" Victor said, shaking a small, handmade canister, then vaulting over the fence as well.

The canisters had been a joint tree creation, aspects of their design taken from blueprints in the Espionage and Human Augmentation trees. Basically just a high pressure airborne sleeping agent inside a pressurized container, rigged to release on a timer, or three seconds after being thrown. It was very fast acting, highly condensed, and odorless. I had planned to make both myself and Victor immune to the gas before coming here, but Victor had taken one look at the way I was stumbling around, half asleep, told me he had some spare gas masks, and sent me back to bed.

I never got to have any fun. The changes to the way our central nervous systems worked would have been quite beneficial in the long run, and could have made us immune to several types of toxin that target nerves. A few weeks of shakes and constant itching would be well worth it.

"If you want to keep the grenades, how are we going to get in?" I asked.

Victor held up a finger, crouched, and waited for the security guard to come around the corner. It was graceful really. A quick strike to the throat and another to the diaphragm to silence him, then a classic sleeper hold to choke him safely into unconsciousness. It's easy to give someone brain damage that way if you don't know what you're doing, but even with the whole bio-tinker thing, I couldn't have done it better.

Victor turned, grinned at me, and I sighed. The gas grenades wouldn't work that well outdoors anyway.

Five minutes later we were in the security center. I was keeping the legs of my jetpack pointed at the prone security guards, because the sedative on the scalpels I nicked them with took several seconds to work properly, and Victor was busy disabling the alarm.

In other news, my jetpack targeting system had passed it's first practical test. The broader kinetic pulses were quite safe, they'd knocked the guards to the ground before they were able to draw their weapons, and once they were down I nicked them with a sedative scalpel while Victor went through and collected their weapons. It went quite well, no broken bones or anything. One man did fall badly, and he had a slight concussion, but my power told me he would be fine with rest.

"The alarm has already gone out. Off-site security is going to review the cameras and you haven't looped them yet." I told Victor.

"I know. Let me work. If the guards are finally out then find the generator and see if you can induce a power spike, it should be two doors down."

I nodded, it's not how I would have gone about this. I'd have used the Espionage tree to go into their systems wirelessly to loop the cameras, and then flooded the building with gas, but that would have taken me a few days to set up, and Victor seemed very sure he could make this work.

I found the generator. Spent a moment looking at it. I didn't have any trees dedicated to energy producing devices, and it wouldn't be worth unlocking something in one of them even if I did, but there was a big breaker switch on the wall, and it didn't take a Tinker to figure out that flipping that down turned the generator off.

Hmm, I actually was getting some ideas on how to improve this generator. Very basic stuff, where to oil, a couple of spurs that could be filed off. Victor had asked for a power surge, not for the generator to be turned off, perhaps I should start it back up again, but operating at more than peak power? It wouldn't be hard, the thing just needed some basic maintenance and someone to disengage the safety protocols.

"What are you doing?" Victor asked me. I looked down.

"Changing the oil in their generator." I told him.

Victor let out a breath of exasperation, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the room.

"We're done here. They bought the old, 'split coffee on the transmitter' excuse."

"How did you do that, there's all sorts of codes that they're supposed to use when a signal gets interrupted?"

"I've stolen a lot of social engineering skills over the years, and they're not expecting trouble here. Alarm is off, camera's are dealt with we've only got… let's see. Seven hours before the next shift comes through. Guess you can go back and fix that generator if you really want to." Victor said with a smile.

I groaned.

"You said you wanted a power surge. I was just getting it running again. Anyway, my sedative only lasts thirty minutes, so we need to move fairly quickly. Are you sure you didn't miss something? This is supposed to be a parahuman detention facility, they should at least have some sort of… I don't know. Backup security protocol."

Victor shrugged.

"Hey, they might have something new, maybe some Tinker stuff I don't know how to spot, but I doubt it. This is a psyche ward, not a prison. They're expecting maybe an angry patient. Not two capes breaking in."

"All right. Where's our target?"

"The lovely Miss Garotte is four hundred meters down that corridor, on the left. Intercom should still be working."

I nodded. Right. This was the part I was most worried about. What if she didn't want to be a test subject? 'I want to cut your brain open and experiment on it' really isn't the best sales pitch. What if her non-human biology reacted badly to the sleeping gas I'd cooked up to pacify her once she agreed? What if she woke up while we were taking her out? Her tendrils could bend steel, and the containment unit I'd put together was too large to carry, so we left it in the car.

My worries vanished as my neural chip picked up on elevated fear levels and flat-lined them, and I placed my hand on the intercom.

"Sveta. Are you awake?" I asked.

The intercom was controlled from this side, set up so that sound and the picture from the camera were both shown on the small control panel. Sveta must have heard me approaching, she was hidden in the top corner of her room, behind the camera. I would have thought the room was empty if I hadn't just walked past the two way mirror.

The room's lights came on with a press of a button on the control pad. It was a fairly small room. A table with some drawing equipment was on the floor, and an oceanic mural was painted on the wall.

"Um. Who are you?" She asked.

"My name is Adam, but that isn't really important. What is important is that I am a bio-Tinker. With your permission, I'd like to try and find a way to remove your powers?"

There was silence, and then Garotte swung into view, tendrils lashing out angrily towards the post in the middle of the room, then grabbing the small table and overturning it in a clear display of lost emotion.

The girl herself, the small, eerily beautiful head in the midst of the agitated maelstrom, ignored what her body was doing.

"Really? You think that you can… turn this off? So I can be killed?"

Huh, kind of sad that she sounded hopeful about that. I guess that, for most people, being reduced to a non-powered lump of organs would be a death sentence.

"Actually I'm fairly sure I can build you a new body." I told her.

If I didn't just clone something up, or find a convenient coma patient to transplant her brain, I could probably spare an early prototype of my full body replacement technology. I would need to test it on someone other than myself first I think, mostly because it's hard to perform maintenance on your own body, and building tech that didn't require maintenance always required being much higher in the tree than just building it normally.

"This… is this real? I… please." Sveta said.

All right. Although considering her circumstances, I'd probably latch onto any hope that came my way as well. I nodded to Victor, and started tapping on the glass wall. Sveta moved over to the sound, her tendrils roaming the glass, snapping into it with a surprising amount of speed and force.

"Please be careful. I don't know how strong the glass…" Sveta started, her words were ripped away as the tendrils noticed the chamber door opening. It was a double door, one side opened, then closed, then the other side opened and closed, all controlled from the door panel.

The doors open, the tendrils pounced on the empty chamber, and plucked curiously at the gas grenade.

They had never really tried to kill Sveta. I don't know why, when she so plainly wanted to die. She had lungs, she still breathed. I don't know for sure if she actually needed to, but most creatures did, and the bags of air hanging from her neck slowly inflated and deflated. Plus, they'd got her in here somehow. I doubt they did it by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs and then closing the door.

I waited patiently as the tendrils crushed the gas grenade, and Sveta careened around the room. That was fine, the glass wall was holding nicely, and activity made the gas act more quickly. Slowly she wound down, eventually collapsing into a surprisingly small bundle of… well I'm going to call it goo.

"Please… don't want this to be a dream…" Sveta muttered.

I waited another minute, drummed on the glass again, and then looked at Victor. I'd read Garotte's case file. The tendrils had never shown the ability to reason. Ambush predator tactics, sure, but faking sleep to lure someone in hadn't happened before. Normally Sveta woke up quickly, and became active almost immediately, but the gas should prevent that. It was effective on humans for twenty four hours.

"You're carrying her." Victor told me, which wasn't really the reassurance I'd been hoping for. I nodded, put my gas mask on, opened both doors, walked in, and poked a tendril with one of my scalpels. It twitched, but didn't attack me. Good.

I picked the poor girl up, and started to walk out.

"That went quite well. Anyone else you want to pick up while we're here?" Victor asked.

"No one else that I think would let me just open up their heads and start messing around in there." I told him.

There were a few other centers like this interstate, and plenty of other patients like Garotte, just none in this particular building at the moment.

"Let's get her back then." Victor said cheerfully.

I re-positioned the girls heart, liver and kidneys over my shoulder, and followed him out of the facility.

 

[Jurric]

I cursed and pulled my fingers back quickly as the reactor breached, and a small spherical section of my desk exploded into clouds of light and dust. I coughed a bit and backed away until the cloud settled, then groaned as I reached for the vacuum I was keeping nearby. As the bonds dissolved, only a tiny section of the energy being released was in the visible spectrum, most of it was contained by the disintegration field itself. Still, without my mask I would have been nearly blinded.

I had to empty the vacuum twice before my workspace was clean again. Or at least clean-ish. The bench was pockmarked with small spheres of missing matter, and otherwise cluttered with failed projects that hadn't had the grace to destroy themselves properly.

You know, if I could isolate what caused my power supplies to detonate and make that detonation reliable, this wouldn't make a bad bomb. I'd need bigger power supplies of course, and I couldn't make them scale either way yet, but bombs might be easier to mass produce than proper lightsabers… That was how I made the reactors in my boots so volatile. A happy accident, not their intended purpose, but still very effective.

Of course the boots released a bomb of kinetic energy, that was the form of energy the generators were designed to produce. The shockwave was considerable, but not likely to kill Crawler or the Siberian. This reactor produced a more exotic form of energy, which affected the laws of physics in such a way as to prevent molecular bonds from forming, and to dissolve currently formed bonds. It didn't matter how tough something was, if it followed the conventional rules of physics, my lightsaber would cut it. The only real problem with this was keeping the reactor from destroying itself. Not a lot of success so far, although having the reactor produce enough energy to explode instead of just slowly dissolving was something.

So it might work on Crawler, hopefully the Siberian as well, but she was more of a Breaker than a Brute.

I'd have a lot more space to work with as well, it might be easier if I was making something the size of a grenade, instead of something the size of a scalpel… yes, it would be tricky, but an anti-Crawler grenade would be worth at least a few hours of experimentation. Now, how could I work on something that size without the risk of being caught in the blast radius when it went critical?

I lay my head on the desk and looked at one of my failures. Nothing for it, I was going to have to invest more energy into the schematics surrounding the lightsaber. The problem was that I had so many other areas I wanted to invest in as well. If I continued up the Espionage tree I would be able to hack the PRT and get some real information on the Nine. I needed to find out what was going on with the Mayhem Protocol, and if I continued to invest into the Neural Augmentation branch that would be easier. I needed to unlock the anti-master powers before Cherish looked into my head, and that was in the same branch, but I also needed to secure funding for a micro-fabricator before I could get much further along on that front. Finally I wanted to access the Cybernetics branch of the Human Augmentation tree, buy some full body replacement tech, or even just continue my work with cybernetic eyes and improved limbs. Naturally that was going to be expensive.

"Um, is everything all right?" Sveta asked.

I turned around to look at the containment tube, where Sveta had been slumbering until recently. Her tendrils were now roaming the thick, hardened plastic, and prying ineffectually at the double door at the end the tube, which I'd use to feed her later. The tendrils were ignoring the pens, pencils and crayons I'd left at the bottom of the tube, although one of the tendrils was flipping open the sketchpad experimentally.

"Just a hiccup. I underestimated how tough you were. I thought a tinkertech alloy scalpel would be enough to operate, but my scans show that your skin, while flexible, is almost impossible to destroy."

Sveta's looked down.

"Oh. Sorry." She said, two simple words that somehow conveyed utter resignation and defeat.

"Don't worry, I have something that can cut you. Your body follows weird physical laws, but it's still made of mostly conventional matter. I tested it on one of your tendrils while you were asleep, and you're still vulnerable to molecular disruption."

I pointed at one gray tendril, slightly shorter than the rest, which was currently roaming the glass. Sveta swiveled to look at it.

"I cut that off near the point of extrusion, it's grown since then, but I can work around a little bit of regeneration. I just need to fine tune a molecular disruptor into a surgical tool."

Harder than I made it sound. I still hadn't made a power supply that lasted longer than five seconds, I couldn't chain them together into something reliable without blowing them all up, and I couldn't swap them out quickly enough, because the outtake ports were frickin' delicate. That, and I couldn't make the disruption field anything other than lightsaber shaped, because that was the schematic I bought, and I hadn't bought all the sub-skills that would let me tweak the design.

"Really? That's good." Sveta said, sounding nervous, and still slightly resigned.

"Sorry about the smaller home. It's a temporary thing. If I can't get some proper surgical tools made up in a day or so I'll set up a proper room for you." I told her.

"Um, thanks. Sorry for being a bother." Sveta said, as her tendrils began to loop around the interior of the tube, and then flex. "Um. How strong is this container?"

"Very strong. Tinkertech plastic." I told her reassuringly. It was originally designed to make airplane wings from the Aviation skill tree. Easily twice as tough as what they had originally used in Garrote's cell, and this had the benefit of being cylindrical, an inherently stronger shape.

"Good. Thanks." Sveta said, her tendrils staining ineffectively.

I'd hung her container from the roof, so she could look around the lab, maybe be a little less bored that way. It had the added benefit of freaking Stacy out, which made very nice revenge for the coffee incident. I'm not sure what exactly it was about exposed organs that made Stacy so nervous. She was a nurse, obviously she could expect to see some every now and again.

Then again, I'd have been scared of exposed organs not that long ago. In fact I'd found it extremely upsetting when Chuckles rippled our dog's liver out, and made Riley sew it back in. Not just fear, fear had been part of what I felt, but also disgust. I'd deliberately tried not to meddle with my sense of disgust, because I felt that it was tied very tightly to my moral code. Why wasn't I feeling that now? Did becoming a bio-Tinker allow me to be calmer about the issue? It was obvious when you think about it? What good would a bio-Tinker be if they were scared of a bit of blood and some surgery. But if my power was altering my mind in that way, what other ways could it be…

What was I thinking about again?

Oh yeah, had to find a way to make surgical tools that would work on a high grade brute. My power bought an exotic energy containment field to the front of my mind, and I noticed that it was surprisingly cheap. Hey, handy, all right, I'll buy that.

The new method would require making the generator too large to be man portable, but I could cope with that. I'd just need to build a large energy generator, then let it detonate and contain the energy in a containment field. Then create a controlled breach that would leak the energy into the emitter very carefully. I wouldn't be able to let out much energy at once without popping the containment field, but I actually wanted a little less power for my lightsaber scalpel, so that worked out just fine.

I started ripping apart the failed power supplies for parts.

"Um, you know my name, and you said that yours was Adam, but I still sort of haven't been introduced to you…" Sveta said.

"Quiet. I've had an idea." I told her.

"Sorry." Sveta said, sounding like a kicked puppy.

I regretted being that brisk a second later, but decided that the girl would cope. I only had another four hours before Kaiser's 'volunteers' showed up for augmentation, and when that happened I'd need to talk with them, put on the Empire persona, put this project aside and start figuring out how to augment as many people as possible, in ways that didn't leave me feeling guilty about what they were going to do with their augmentations.

Part way through constructing the molecular disintegration energy containment chamber, I realized that I was going to be using an improvised bomb inside a force field to power my super scalpel. Surgery with explosives. That made me grin.

"Hey, Mayhem." Victor said.

I tried not to jump, the live power leads in my hands would not do nice things to my desk if I dropped them.

"Victor. How long have you been there?" I asked, not turning around. I was on a roll.

"A few minutes. What's this thing."

"Super scalpel." I said shortly.

Victor peered around me, looked at the bulky structure currently taking up almost the entirety of the desk.

"Scalpel. I can see that." He said sarcastically.

"Super scalpel power source. In a rush here." I told him, reaching past him for the pliers.

"If you say so. I came to tell you, Lung and Lee have both been arrested." Victor said.

Didn't care. Needed to finish re-assembling this circuit board.

"Uh huh, if you're going to hang around get Stacy, then get my welding kit. I have to finish welding the frame, and I need six hands."

Victor sighed.

"Tinker fugue." He muttered to himself. I was dimly aware of him leaving, and of him coming back with Stacy. Who had been avoiding this room for most of the day.

"So if Armsmaster has arrested Lung, does this mean we're going to war with the ABB?" Stacy asked.

"Maybe. I think Kaiser wants to try and bring Purity back into the fold before he strikes. Overwhelming force, we'll be able to I crush them quickly, with minimal fuss and without exposing too much of our flanks to the other gangs."

"How do you think Armsmaster did it? Capturing Lee, Lung, and that Undersider all in one fight, that's… really impressive. Most heroes just try to survive Lung when he goes on a rampage." Stacy said. I moved her hands to the beam I wanted steadied, then gave Victor the welding kit.

"I've got a few guesses. I don't think he took down Lung alone. Lung's been making noises about killing the Undersiders ever since they robbed his casino. I'd say the Undersiders called a truce with Armsmaster, or just lead Lung to somewhere Armsmaster was patrolling, and helped him win the fight. They have a darkness generator, who would be a pretty good counter to a line of sight teleporter like Lee. Hellhound was severely burned and unconscious when she was taken into custody, I wouldn't be surprised if her teammates left her behind deliberately, because she probably would have died if Armsmaster hadn't called in Panacea to heal her, and I'd also say that she and her dogs were probably doing something to attract Lung's attention while Armsmaster took him down."

"Copper wire." I demanded, it was placed in my hand, and I started soldering it in place.

"So that just leaves the ABB with their bomb Tinker?" Stacy said.

"Yeah. Still tricky and dangerous, but not impossible, especially if we can convince our maniacal little friend here to help us find a counter." Victor said cheerfully.

They kept talking for a little while, about other inconsequential things, something about the reasons Purity had for leaving, and how Night and Fog were kind of creepy. And them some other stuff. I wasn't paying a lot of attention.

I placed the circuit board on the generator, checked that Victor's welding was stable, and then used my tazer fingers to give the machine the jolt it needed.

Hmm, nothing happening. The upsized molecular energy disintegration generator might not be unstable enough to explode. It might be a blank. I'd have to disassemble the device to find it and check...

Nope, there it was, we had ignition! I laughed as we completely failed to disintegrate on a molecular level. Instead the containment field held, and a ball of glowing energy stayed trapped inside the generator.

"It's finished." I said, still chuckling with glee.

"Excellent. Time check?" Victor asked.

"Five forty seven." Stacy announced brightly.

"How long's he been at it?" Victor asked.

"I don't know sorry. I left him alone once he finished making me help him hang that cylender on the ceiling."

"Not done yet. Need to make the output port and scalpel now." I told her.

Victor sighed, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me away from the bench.

"You need a shower, or you'll scare away everyone you're supposed to be augmenting. Trust me, personal hygiene in doctors makes people far more likely to trust them."

Sveta finally worked up the courage to speak.

"Um, you guys aren't heroes… are you?"

 

[Jurric]

Sveta was surprisingly calm about being held captive by superpowered Nazis. Which was annoying. If I managed to cure her I wanted to be able to turn her against them, ideally against Alabaster, he was the only one I wouldn't be able to take out reliably. If all went according to plan I wouldn't need backup, but things don't always go according to plan, so someone to watch my back would be great.

I sighed as another bald, tattooed annoyance made his way into my office. I'd tried to get them to come into the workshop instead so I could get some work done, but after one of them saw Sveta and started vomiting that idea fell through.

I was going to have to build that girl a body fairly soon. I could probably stick her in it even before I fixed the tendrils, depending on how sturdy I could make it.

"So I was thinking, like, Wolverine claws, but with real badass finger daggers too, and then, like, maybe x-ray eyes. That would be fucking cool." The annoyance said.

"Fine. Whatever. Take one of these a day and see me in a week." I told him, passing him some sugar pills.

"These pills are gunner make Gunner grow claws? Fucking sick!" The man said.

I sighed.

"They're to prepare you for the operation. Increased bone density and blood production. Now get out."

"So I like, have healing factor?"

I rested my head in my hands.

"You know what. Yes. You'll have a weak healing factor. Get out."

"Thanks man. You're not going to regret this. Gunner gut those Chinks."

My eyes fell on the man's file, which I had neglected to actually read before he came in.

Was his name really Gunner? Was that mangling of the English language deliberate? Where was Kaiser finding these people? Obviously he wanted everyone I augmented to be considered expendable. Why? I thought I'd done a good job of pulling the wool over his eyes.

The door opened, and Stacy came in.

"I was listening." She told me.

"So? We're done right, he was the last one?" I said.

"You're in a real mood. I know you didn't get much sleep last night, but you never get much sleep. Why are you like this?" She asked.

I blinked. Right. I was letting my emotions get the better of me. I could turn them off, but I didn't want to. This anger, helplessness, loss, I deserved to be feeling it. I'd managed to find a video online last night, just shaky cell phone footage and it was taken down before I could watch the whole thing, but I saw enough.

I stood up.

"My neural circuitry is having problems. I need to fix it. No interruptions." I told Stacy, brushing one of my sedative covered scalpels along her arm as I pushed past her, leaving a tiny cut. She blinked at me as I walked away, then sat down so she didn't hurt herself when she fell asleep. Smart girl.

I didn't stay in the building. There was something I needed to do if I wanted to stay on the course I had set myself. I put on a hoodie as I left, pulled it over my head to hide the mask, and started jogging. Night had fallen already, and it was easy to stay out of sight, and to make sure no one saw my face.

"Lethal mode, active." I muttered, lurking in an alley until my target came into sight.

I looked around with my mask, checking everything within eyesight twice before I walked over to Donald. It was about time for him to leave his home, and visit the fighting ring. I knew the route he took, I often jogged to Hookwolf's fighting ring, and the last time I had been there I followed him home.

Donald was six foot and two inches of walking muscle. One of Hookwolf's fighters, and probably one of the best non-parahuman brawlers in this city. I'd sparred with him three times, and even I could tell that he was holding back massively. It had been less of a fight, and more of a training exercise, he was quite good at leading me on, moving just slightly faster than I could, pushing me to excel.

The second time, when I hadn't been able to surprise him with a tazer in my fingers and I hadn't been using the Mayhem Protocol, he'd basically just bounced me around the ring until he decided I'd had enough.

I waved to him, jogging to catch up with his brisk steps as he walked home. I think his choice of house was deliberate. It was on the border of Empire and ABB territory. Donald wasn't afraid of anything.

He was dumb though. Fortunately.

"Donald. How are you doing?" I asked.

"Not bad. Looking forward to a match or two. Are you joining us tonight?" Donald said jovially.

I didn't go to Hookwolf's gathering every night. Most nights I just tinkered, trying to perfect my tech. I rarely went more than one night in four, but it had been three days. Not an unlikely pattern.

"Probably, yeah, but there's something I want to talk to you about first." I told him.

I motioned to a nearby alley, and he followed me in without question.

"Oh, a few things. Mostly just wanted to hang out." I told him, leading him deeper, away from prying eyes. "It's always good to hang out with you Donald, you remind me of what the Empire is really about."

And why, if the Nine didn't destroy them, I would need to do so myself.

"Yeah." He said, perking up. He didn't have a lot of friends. Oh he was respected, which was almost worse in it's way, but not many people actually liked him. He did need to be handled carefully. There was a certain amount of respect for capes in there, beaten into him by Hookwolf, but normals who didn't fit into his world view properly had a tendency to get the snot beaten out of them. It was easier for them to avoid him, and laugh along uncomfortably when he did seek out companionship.

"Yeah. The others, they mention the cause now and again, but it's on the back-burner for them. It's like… they go about their lives, and they're happy, personable people, but it's not something that's… in your face, you know what I mean?"

"Um… no?" He said, confusion struggling not to become anger.

"You remember how a few days ago you were talking about that woman you raped and killed?"

"Which one? The chink or the nigger?"

I paused. There had been more than one? Well that… didn't change things.

"Yes," I continued. I'd rehearsed this, and I wasn't quite ready for the change in script. "Both. Whatever. Anyway, it reminded me of a… potential problem. I've never killed anyone."

I did have to viciously beat a poor man who's only crime was being a black shoplifter in E88 territory during my initiation, but that was very different. I was a bio-tinker, I could beat someone convincingly without going all in. I caused him pain, but only enough to make his cries convincing. I didn't do anything that wouldn't heal, and he was going to have severe back trouble in a few years, which a few well placed blows prevented. Concussive chiropractic care. It should have balanced out as less pain in the long term. I wasn't happy about having to do it, but I also wasn't too torn up about it either.

Only Hookwolf's crew had to actually be 'bloodied' and, among them Donald was the most… enthusiastic. I was allowed at their gatherings, but I had no desire to actually become one of them, and fortunately Hookwolf wasn't pushing for it. I think he planned to, but Kaiser didn't want me scared off just yet.

"It'll happen, don't worry. You can talk with Hookwolf about it, if you want to join the Chosen like that. He can find someone." Donald said, misreading my intentions, as I had expected him to.

"I'm not sure I want to join the Chosen exactly… I mean, it would be cool and all, but I hear that your first time killing someone is always the hardest. The time when you might, you know, throw up or something. I figure I should do that now, when I'm not in public, or when it's not the middle of some life or death crisis. Anyway, I was hoping that you could help me?" I was babbling, the script was breaking down. It was stupid anyway, it sounded cool in my head, but really, why was I trying to sound cool? No one was going to hear, and there was nothing 'cool' about this.

Part of me wished I had just picked someone I didn't know, someone I hadn't fought, but then how could I be sure? I didn't want to kill an undercover cop by mistake or anything. Donald I was sure about.

Donald's brow furrowed. The cogs in his head turning.

"Yeah. OK. Chink would be easiest. You got a preference? Girl, guy…"

I raised my hand and shot a kinetic pulse into his head. Normally the blasts are designed to diffuse, not all the kinetic energy disperses directly at the point of impact. A sort of body slam or thrown punch effect, rather than the effect of a bullet.

Of course, that was something I could turn off.

Donald dropped to the ground, a small hole in his face, just under the eye. I'd been aiming for his forehead. Should remember to go for the center of mass, next time.

I stood there for a second trying to feel the revulsion I expected. I hadn't disabled revulsion, or disgust, or the whole plethora of other emotions that made me something other than a sociopath.

Nothing. Guess that the whole 'oh god I killed someone' was mostly about fear. Either that, or I was more of a monster than I thought I was. My power was even giving me a large chunk of energy for this.

Guess I should double tap. I remember reading that people could survive surprisingly well with a bullet in their brain, under exactly the right conditions.

I raised my hand, fired another pulse. Unfortunately my hand was shaking too much, the sidewalk beside Donald's head splintered. I stared at my trembling hand, tried to figure out why it wasn't obeying me. Oh well, I was a bio-tinker, I could see into Donald's skull. In my power enhanced medical opinion, he was dead.

I pulled a pair of thin surgical gloves out of my pocket.

"You know… I'd like to say that I did this for justice. To stop you hurting more people." I told the corpse as I snapped the gloves on, then opened my backpack.

Buying a green beanie and a red scarf without Victor noticing had been tricky. I wasn't monitored twenty four seven, but I didn't have a car, and I was still blind without my mask, so he felt justified in walking me through the shops when I needed to buy things. In the end I bought a gray beanie and scarf, and made the dyes myself. I pulled the beanie over my eyes, covering the mask and most of my face, the mask still worked through the thin wool.

"That would be lying though. What you did made you an acceptable target, but…" I told him, putting my boot on his side and tilting his body until I could pull out the gun I knew he carried under his coat.

"I was telling the truth about needing to learn to kill." I said, eying the gun. If my estimate was right, the kinetic blasts I'd used should have similar penetrative power as a .22 Caliber bullet, which is what this gun carried.

Let's see… dressed like an ABB gangster, gun in hand, corpse ready.

"Mayhem, Objectives: Survival, replicate kinetic attacks with bullets to fool forensics, avoid leaving evidence. Time, ten seconds. Activate."

Ten seconds later I was still standing over a corpse, a smoking gun in my hands.

Heh, in the end, did I really need to figure out Mayhem? It only needed to work a few more times. It didn't feel anything, and I had the technology now to extend the time it could operate. When the Nine came to town, I'd use it against Cherish. Not the anti-Master tech. The only difference would be that Mayhem didn't really have a conscience. You didn't need a conscience to fight the Nine.

Well no, maybe I should put a bit more work into giving Mayhem a moral code. I could do that later though. When I hadn't just killed someone.

This was a rough neighborhood. Gunshots might draw attention, but they also might not. I didn't even know why I was bothering to hide forensic evidence. Skinhead killed near ABB territory. The story wrote itself. The Empire wasn't going to look into it, the Police weren't going to look into it. It happened every few days.

I threw the gun down beside the body, and walked away. I'd already checked a map of the area, there hadn't been anyone near enough to directly intervene… just needed to walk into ABB territory, cut through a few buildings, dissolve the scarf and beanie with a little acid and pour the mess down a drain, and then jog back to Hookwolfs fighting ring. It wasn't far, Hookwolf wanted to be able to deploy to the front lines as quickly as possible, if it became necessary.

I'd have to act normal. I'd have to be calm. I'd have to stay serene about the new blood on my hands. And I'd do it. I'd teach myself the hard way. Train myself. Forge myself into something that could pull the trigger when the time came.

I looked around again, saw no one, heard nothing. I'd gotten away clean. My hands were still shaking. I'd have to identify the emotions causing that, suppress them. Maybe for good. I couldn't afford to be this weak.

Last night I had watched half a video from the latest Slaughterhouse Nine attack. They'd attacked Richmond city. Thousands were dead from Shatterbirds scream, but as was often the case, the most horrifying thing to come out of it was my sisters work.

A wall of living flesh, three meters long, nothing but skin, organs, arms and the heads of her victims, pleading for help for days before the PRT deemed it impossible, and put the men, women and children on that wall out of their misery.

I didn't turn down my emotions. I turned them up, feeling everything about what I'd just done. What my sister had just done. Punishment for waiting. For thinking that I could make things OK.

Even without eyes, I still had tear ducts. Jack Slash hadn't taken that from me.

I should burn them shut, my mask doesn't cope that well with water.

Slowly I decided that wallowing in self recrimination would get me nowhere. The sooner I got into Hookwolf's fighting ring, the less likely they were to notice the lag between when I left the clinic, and when I got here, and connect it to a dead murderer.

I started readjusting my emotions, lowering what I couldn't deal with, raising my anger and determination back up so I could feed on the energy they provided.

"I'm sorry Riley. I'll be ready soon." I promised.

Then I played the file that would control my body language and micro-expressions, and walked into the warehouse.

 

[Jurric]

I made my way back to my lab, sore and bruised, but feeling much better emotionally. Not only had I manually equalized things, I was also taking steps in the right direction. I was even learning to cope with low levels of fear again, because that seemed to help me gain energy for my power more quickly.

My sparring had gone quite well. I'd managed my first unarmed win against an unpowered E88 gangster, and then fought several more with my scalpels, boots, tazer fingers and pulse weapons. I'd even fought Cricket again. It had been a little bit nerve wracking, but she hadn't mentioned what she said the first time, under the effects of morphine. She seemed as willing to forget about the whole thing as I was.

Although she was wearing a different shirt today, one that showed off her extremely well defined abs...

I checked that Stacy had fed Sveta, and then went to bed. I used to have trouble falling asleep unless I pushed myself to complete exhaustion, but my neural enhancement could send me off to sleep very quickly when I needed it to. I was still working on a way to stop the nightmares.

I was woken up by someone shaking me, and quickly put my mask on, so I could see who it was.

"Victor's on the phone. The ABB are attacking." Stacy said, helping me settle the mask, and then handing me a mobile and leaving the room. Presumably to prepare the clinic. I put it to my ear.

"Victor?" I said.

"Mayhem. We have a problem. Bakuda's going into a meltdown without Lee or Lung to control her. We have multiple bombs going off in our territory. She's blowing up schools, warehouses… it's a huge mess. Normally we'd go all unwritten rules on her, everyone in the city would gang up to put her down, but she's in public, we know where she is, and she has no backup. Kaiser's decided it's time to end the problem, once and for all."

I blinked, got out of bed, and started attaching the legs of my jetpack to my back.

"All right, what do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Medical. You, Rune, Othala and Cricket are going to be helping victims in our territory as much as possible. You're also our defensive line if one of the other gangs tries to take a crack at us while we mop up the ABB. Rune will begin delivering wounded to you soon, I need you to set up the clinic for an influx of casualties."

"On it." I told him.

"Good. Have you managed to make any direct counters to Bakuda?"

"I didn't have the time. I wasn't expecting things to move this quickly!" I told him.

"All right. Keep the mobile phone on you, I'll keep you posted." Victor said, then he hung up.

They must be in a rush. I wasn't expecting things to move this quickly.

I'd have to be in costume for this.

My costume wasn't that impressive. Just my white blindfold mask. A white lab coat, and under that white jeans and a white shirt. The lab coat did have a lot of pockets though, which I used to store some basic medical gear, some tinkering tools, a few of my more commonly needed chemical compounds, and a few extra scalpels. The shirt and the lab coat had holes in the back which the legs of my jetpack could fit through.

I fumbled for a minute, figured out that I needed to put my costume on first, and then the jetpack legs, did things in the right order and then left my room. I'd need to brew another batch or so of my cell growth formula, get the surgery prepped in case it was… no, for when it was needed.

Victor hadn't been kidding about bombs going off. I heard one as I started to mix my formula. It rattled the building, startling Sveta in her container, and sending her tendrils hammering against the glass.

My first patients arrived only minutes later.

To my surprise I was mostly treating civilians. The E88 were racist, horrible dickwads, and I had to remind myself of that regularly, but they were well aware that if they didn't treat the one species that they did approve of…

Did I just think 'species?' Dear god I was going to have to leave this organization soon. Anyway, the E88 treated white people well, because if they didn't they alienated everyone, and turned the whole world into their enemies. The clinic would probably have to be moved after this, but people in E88 territory would be protected, as much as w… they were able to protect them.

There were a few skinheads and gang members who made it through the doors of the clinic, but Bakuda had obviously had a hard time attacking E88 warehouses or gatherings directly. Instead she'd just scattered her bombs near undefended, unwatched targets. I treated soccer mums, accountants, a janitor who had stayed to late at a school.

Othala arrived, and she was able to help quite a lot. Our powers complemented each other. Her ability to heal wasn't perfect, it wasn't instant regeneration, in fact it was rather slow unless everything was lined up, ready to heal quickly anyway, and she was able to use it for triage, to stabilize a patient while they waited for attention. It closed the cuts and bleeding wounds, helped people come out of shock, generally took the edge off my own work.

She wasn't much help for the exotic cases though. Some were fairly simple. The man who's arm was turned to crystal just needed a tourniquet, some cauterization, and a sedative.

Others were very tricky. How do you heal someone who's nervous system has been re-purposed into an overactive Christmas Tree? I think I actually killed that poor woman, shut down everything in her body, then got it started again before brain death set in, but I was too deep in a tinker fugue state to really pay attention.

Things went fairly well, most people who walked through the doors we were able to save. Some corpses were carried through, but there wasn't a lot Othala or I could do about that, and there was this one man who's blood vessels had turned to lead from the torso down, I couldn't really do a lot for him, but we saved a lot of lives.

Again I had to keep people out of the lab. Once I left the door open while I was brewing some coagulant, and someone saw Sveta and there was a bit of fuss because they seemed to think that I was the one who made her that way. Cricket quieted that down with a few waves of her kama.

It was a fairly neat setup. Rune scouted and brought us wounded on stretchers. Cricket was on guard duty, and Othala and I saved the ones who could be saved. Later they had vans as well, carting people in and out of the clinic. The place was designed for exclusive clients, nowhere near this sort of volume, but we made do.

I focused on the task at hand, not really retaining the surgery, the screams, and the carnage. There was one case where someone walked in with a bomb implanted in their body. A white male, visibly sweating. I don't know how Cricket picked up on it, but as soon as she saw him she threw one of her scythes through his face, grabbed his body, carried it across the street and ran back before he exploded into purplish mist. Again there was panic, but this time Cricket was able to calm it down with a few glares.

The worst thing to happen was the new trigger. A dark haired woman with a split lip and a child who was dead when she was bought to us. She showed me the small, green crystal body, and begged me to fix her daughter.

There is not a lot you can do when someone's been completely transmuted. No brain patterns, ontological inertia means that getting rid of the cause isn't going to fix the problem, being turned to crystal makes someone more dead than having their head cut off.

"I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do." I told her. She fell to her knees, crying, and I was moving past her to help a man who'd suffered severe burns when I suddenly found myself on the floor, picking myself up slowly. Cricket had already leaped to her feet. Confusion on her face, and her head searching for an unseen attack.

My neural chip is designed to alert me when it senses the brain activity that coincides with a trigger, or I would probably have suspected an attack as well. I would have figured it out quickly anyway, it wasn't really a private trigger.

"No, no look!" The woman cried. "She's moving, see! She's moving!"

The corpse of the child was moving. Cracks were spreading through it's fingers, but the shards of crystal were staying together, making a sort of lattice that let the fingers twitch. Some sort of crystal kinesis, or telekinesis. Or some sort of illusion thing.

I didn't really know what to do. What do you do? Triggers were horrible things. You lost everything, and you were very likely to lash out. I reached for one of my scalpels. Sedate her and deal with the issue when I wasn't in a crowded room filled with wounded sounded like a good plan to me.

Othala beat me to it.

"She is moving, isn't she. Why don't we take her into the back room over there, and we'll see what we can do for you. You look like you ran all the way here, is there something I can get you? Some water maybe?"

I glanced at Othala, raised the scalpel questioningly as she hugged the distraught woman. The healer shook her head and gently lead the woman and her child out of the room. Not how I would have handled it, but I was more than willing to let someone else deal with that mess.

Guess I'd be operating without regeneration for a while.

Finally my mobile phone rang. I put it on speaker so I could finish wrapping the burn victim in treated bandages, which would hopefully help his skin grow back.

"Mayhem here. With a patient." Who I had just nicked with a scalpel. He'd be asleep in about seven seconds, given his current heart rate.

"Mayhem this is Victor. We captured Bakuda but she says she has a bomb hidden that could take out the whole city if she doesn't send it a regular signal."

I frowned. EMP? No, I couldn't make one big enough. Jammer? No, it was primed to detonate without a signal. Fleet of seeking drones? To long to build them, and I didn't have those sorts of schematics yet.

"How often does she need to send this signal out?" I asked, tying the last bandage.

"No idea. But from her wording she intends to hold the bomb over our heads for a long time. It should be a long enough interval for her to sleep. She isn't nervous about dying right now, my best guess is we have at least an hour."

I thought furiously, then sighed.

"Bring her here. I can force her to tell us how to find it and defuse it."

"How? Torture is unreliable, even for a bio-Tinker."

I thought back to the men and women I'd treated. I could do this. Wouldn't even make me feel bad.

"I'll Tinker with her brain. Make her compliant. It's not hard."

There was a pause from the other end, some muffled conversation, then Victor came back.

"Purity will be bringing her. I'll be there as soon as possible. I hope you know what you're doing."

So did I. Oh, I knew how to manipulate someone's brain. Neural Enhancements was the branch that I was currently most invested in. It was my highest tech at the moment, and I was confident that Bakuda would keep her memories, and loose her ability to say no or lie. Long term there would be problems, she'd probably end up a vegetable unless I put a chip in to regulate things properly, but I knew I could get answers from her.

What I wasn't so sure about was letting the E88 know that I could do this sort of thing. It was… hardly safe. Their recruitment policy was aggressive enough already.

I went to the back room, where Othala had taken the new trigger, knocked, and entered.

The woman was lying on the ground, shards of green crystal turning red with her blood as they pierced her body.

Othala looked up at me, stopped holding the hand of the corpse.

"I… I tried to stop her. As soon as she realized the girl wasn't alive…"

I nodded.

"They have Bakuda. She had a fail-safe, I need to prep for neurosurgery, can you keep healing?"

Othala grimaced, wiped a fine crystal dust from herself, and nodded.

"Yeah. I need a few seconds to collect myself, but I can do this."

I went to the surgery, started Tinkering with the equipment, made up a chemical that when injected correctly would inhibit certain higher thought functions.

I wasn't sure if I would make a neural chip. Bakuda becoming a vegetable was fine by me. On the other hand her bombs might actually hurt the Siberian, and the whole 'trapped behind your own eyes' thing made a good punishment as well.

Choices, choices.

 

[Jurric]

[PRIMO VICTORIA]

I was surprised to find that they hadn't sedated Bakuda. She was awake, but it looked like Kaiser had grown some sort of metal cage around her, immobilizing each individual limb. Not how I would have done it, it's pretty easy to make voice activated Tinkertech. I wasn't sure if Purity's power included gravity manipulation, or superhuman strength, or if she just worked out. Either way she was able to carry the woman, and the metal cage she was inside. It might just be leverage and a light metal though.

I don't think Bakuda would have made it through the lobby if Purity didn't all but blind everyone as she carried the villainess through. There was a lot of hatred there, and a few people who managed to glimpse just who Purity had been carrying tried to follow her into the surgery, demanding answers.

"…me go, and I'll hunt you down and slaughter you, and everyone you fucking care about you fucking halfwit!" Bakuda yelled at Purity. I nicked her with a scalpel. That really wasn't helping her survival prospects.

Purity dropped Bakuda and turned to deal with the crowd while Stacy and I maneuvered the woman onto a scanner.

Let's see… nothing. She had a grand total of zip internal enhancements. Although she was wearing a heart monitor, and that looked like a bit of rewiring around it so that it could transmit the data from it's sensor somewhere else.

Someone had shot her repeatedly in the feet. Lot's of bone and tissue damage. She'd never walk again unless I sorted that out. I wasn't particularly inclined to do so, but I did inject a cell growth and coagulant to prevent her bleeding out. No other tech on her or in her. So let's crack that skull open.

Victor came in about halfway through the procedure, while I was still fitting the new, stripped down version of my own neural chip.

"What am I looking at?" He asked.

"I permanently destroyed her aggression centers. Left anything that could contain memories, but she'll probably have severe depression anyway. Abstract reasoning is turned off, as is long term planning. She'll be operating in a dream world, without motivation of her own. Basically like someone in a really deep hypnotic trance. Very suggestible."

"What are you doing now?"

"Emotion control chip. It will take a while to calibrate after it's been installed, but it won't take another thirty seconds to implant properly. Should let us keep under full control. Pass me the blue tube and a pair of forceps please." I told him.

Three minutes later I was done, her skull was closed, and her flesh stitched back together. Meatball surgery at it's finest.

"Now Victor, we're going to have about ten minutes of full lucidity before her brain starts swelling. I can give her additional periods with the right chemicals, but only for five minutes at a time, and we'll only have three of them before her mind starts to deteriorate in unpredictable ways."

Victor glared at me.

"You said you were sure you could do this?"

"I am. She'll answer everything you need answered. We need to be quick about things anyway. Although… Victor, you planning on dying any time soon?" I asked.

Waking someone up directly after a brain operation is not medically advisable. I injected Bakuda with enough adrenaline to counter the sedative anyway. It would take a few seconds to take effect.

"Not really, why?" Victor asked. Turning a bloody circular saw over in his fingers carefully.

"Shirt off please, I need someone to keep this on until we're sure we've defused the last of Bakuda's bombs." I told him, lifting Bakuda's shirt high enough to get to the heart monitor, cutting it free, but keeping the sensor pressed to her skin, so there wasn't an interruption in the signal.

"You sure it's safe, it's not Tinkertech designed to make sure she's the one wearing it?" Victor asked, although he did take his shirt off.

"Certain. I've scanned it, and it's a bog standard heart monitor, she only meddled with the transmitter." I said, transferring the sensor as quickly as possible, then strapping it to Victor's chest with a series of bandages.

"She's made a lot of bombs. I don't think that she had time to make anything else." I told Victor.

I turned Bakuda over, slapped her twice to help the adrenaline do it's job.

She said something in what I think was Japanese.

"She's complaining that her head hurts." Victor told me.

"Pretty normal. I just opened it up. There might be some mild concussion, but I was careful, memories won't be affected. Can you get her to speak English? I'd like to be able to verify things."

"Shouldn't be hard, she had barely any accent, must have learned the language young. Bakuda! Listen to me, we'll make it stop hurting, but first you have to tell us about your bomb. Your biggest one." Victor said, leaning over her and focusing the surgery lights on her face.

Bakuda would probably have tried to shield her face from the light, but I hadn't cut her out of the restraints that Kaiser had grown yet. Instead she just closed her eyes.

"Big bomb? I didn't like it. It wasn't original. Wasn't smart. Just really really big. Need to send it a code…" Bakuda tried to sit up, and found herself unable to. "Code. Need to send a code. How long since I sent code?"

Victor glanced at me.

"I enhanced her desire for survival as well. Thought it might help. She might also have an enhanced appetite, similar area of the brain for both." I told him.

Victor nodded, looked back at Bakuda.

"Bakuda, this is important, I need you to tell me everything you know about this code. How it works, how you send it. How often it has to be sent. Everything."

Bakuda nodded, and gave us the details we wanted. Then she told us about the bomb. Where it was, how to get there. She even started on how to defuse it, but it was a long, complicated process. I wasn't sure I'd trust myself to follow everything perfectly with the city on the line. I wouldn't trust Bakuda to disarm it in her current state, but we could easily postpone the detonation indefinitely, so that wasn't much of an issue.

It wasn't as bad as we thought. The code could be sent from any mobile device, she gave us that code, and it didn't need to be sent again for another hour and a half. In return I gave her a local pain killer for my recent cranial surgery.

We left Bakuda on the operating table and went into the lab to discuss things.

"There has to be some way we can test the code?" Victor asked. "Some way we can make sure she isn't messing with us?"

I shrugged.

"For what it's worth, I trust my skills at surgery. I could probably make Bakuda sing the little teapot song. She doesn't really have much will of her own left."

"That might help actually." Victor said, taking out his phone and dialing. "I'm going to call in a few others. Kaiser, maybe Alabaster. She said the bomb was in her secondary lab, we might need someone who can tank her traps."

"She could have the traps rigged to blow the main bomb instead. I'll try to get her into a state where she can disable the traps for us." I said.

"Fine. Keep her restrained for now though." Victor ordered.

I nodded.

Let's see. Cell growth formula and bone glue into her head. A couple of painkillers. Some more adrenaline. A bit of healing from Othala and I could cut her out of Kaisers cage and put her in a wheelchair.

I found Othala in the lobby, still healing people. She looked half dead. Probably still struggling with the whole 'woman who triggered' thing. That was nasty.

"I need your help." I told her. She nodded, brushed another patient, and followed me back into the surgery.

I noticed that the wounds of the new arrivals were changing. I wasn't seeing the exotic effects of Bakuda's bombs, instead I was seeing gunshot wounds, contusions, broken bones… I think that one man was sliced with some sort of sword.

We'd taken out the capes, the bombs had stopped, but the ABB was still fighting. A shame. Still, the victims were E88 gangsters now. It wasn't as bad as when the civilians had been coming in.

I had to break out an angle grinder to get Bakuda out of Kaiser's work, but we managed to get her strapped down into a wheelchair without much fuss. She was easy enough to order around. No signs of resistance, although the neural chip I had implanted was getting some odd readings. It was hard to say exactly how or why, but her corona pollentia was being re-mapped as a backup aggression center. I fixed that remotely, isolated and disabled the neurons creating the new links. I'd have to keep an eye on that, but things hadn't had a chance to set themselves up properly, it was fine.

Othala gave Bakuda enough healing that she wasn't likely to kill herself if she was forced to Tinker, but not enough to get her feet back in order, and went back out to the lobby. I helped Victor take her out the back entrance.

"What did Kaiser say?" I asked.

"We're to take her to the bomb. Make her disable it. He'll meet us there personally. Can you teach me how to keep her stable?"

Rune came in, marked Bakuda's chair and floated a large ashphalt platform down for me and Victor to get on.

"Stable? Well not very stable. She's on a cocktail of drugs and she's just had her brain cut open. I can teach you to operate her implant, but we'll need a few hours. Why?"

"Your surgery, is it going to hold?" Victor asked.

"Probably. Define hold?" I said, snapping my fingers in front of Bakuda's eyes. Her pupils weren't dilating properly.

"So you need to be the one who triggers the periods of lucidity?"

"Yes. Sorry. I could maybe pre-program one period, but you wouldn't be able to safely induce another without some sort of Tinker brain specialty. Or another fifteen minutes with Othala."

"All right. You're coming with us then. Rune. You know where to go." Victor said.

I hopped onto a floating piece of asphalt and tried to keep my balance as we rose over the city. Then decided it would be simpler to just fly with my own jetpack, and lifted off.

The city was a mess. I could hear ambulance sirens, police sirens and fire fighter sirens waring with each other to be heard as we drifted over nearly empty streets. This, I thought, is probably what a war zone looks like.

Heh, ironic, looking back. I was naive then.

We collected Kaiser first, picked him up off a battlefield strewn with his blades, and the broken bodies of Asians. To my surprise we left Fenja and Menja behind, along with the rest of the E88. Purity even left us, to continue cutting a swathe through the ABB rank and file.

We lifted off again, and I figured that now was as good a time as any to get my hands on some decent ordinance. It would take me nearly a year to get access to the bombs Bakuda was making through my own power.

"Kaiser, just a point I would like to raise."

"What is it Mayhem."

"I've Mastered Bakuda. I can keep her Mastered indefinitely. No risk. And her bombs would be incredibly useful if used correctly."

"I'll consider the matter." Kaiser said.

Then we went to Bakuda's workshop.

We weren't the first ones there. Part of the shop was glass, the other half oddly melted, like something had somehow turned the walls and ceiling to wet clay, and then solidified it again halfway.

Rune didn't set us down, but she did hover us low enough to see into the ruined remains of the building.

Armsmaster, Kid Win, Vista and Clockblocker were all standing around a large sphere.

"Motion, damage and light sensors on the interior." Kid Win reported, putting down something that looked like an overly large camera.

"Motion sensors are GPS based. Our backup plan should work. Vista, you're up." Armsmaster ordered.

Vista nodded, and started shrinking the bomb. It wobbled slightly and Kaiser decided that was as good a time as any to make himself known.

"Armsmaster, you beat us to it. Well done." He said.

"Kaiser." Armsmaster said, bringing his Halberd to bear. He hesitated when he saw Bakuda in a wheelchair.

Kaiser tutted.

"Now now, it looks like you didn't come prepared to fight me. That suit was designed for the ABB wasn't it?" Kaiser asked, as small, decorative spikes rose from the exterior of the suit.

Armsmaster made the sort of sound you'd normally associate with an enraged bull, but lowered his weapon as Rune floated a chunk of rock in front of Kaiser for cover.

"We're dealing with a superweapon here Kaiser. Hand over Bakuda, and I'll let you go."

Kaiser shook his head.

"Your plan was to make Vista shrink it, and Clockblocker contain it? But how are you going to make it detonate while Clockblockers ability is in place?" Kaiser asked.

Armsmaster looked behind him. Clockblocker and Vista hadn't stopped working. The bomb and the bench it was on were now both completely surrounded by a large blanket, which Clockblocker immediately froze.

Armsmaster raised a fist, and pressed a small button.

There was no sound from under the blanket, but Armsmaster had a satisfied look on his face.

"I hope you know what you're doing. If objects that Clockblocker uses his power on are truly locked in time, they should block radio signals. If that really was a detonator, perhaps the signal will reach the bomb only when the time-lock effect wears off?" Victor said.

"Clockblockers ability is radio-permeable. We tested it." Armsmaster said, shrugging. That was weird. Then again it was light permeable, probably, seeing as how frozen objects still had coloration. "Now give us Bakuda, she has a lot to answer for."

"And why won't the blast simply ricochet around the interior of the blanket until the effect wears off?" Victor asked.

"Because Clockblocker's ability absorbs energy, instead of redirecting it. Otherwise everyone would bounce off his frozen objects, instead of collide with them." Armsmaster said.

Kaiser glanced from Armsmaster, who wore metal armor and could be taken out easily. To Kid Win, who he could also be taken out the same way, to Vista and Clockblocker. Two admittedly powerful Wards.

On our side. Rune, Victor, Kaiser and myself. Bakuda in a wheelchair probably didn't count for either side, although Armsmaster wouldn't know about the brain modification, so he'd probably be watching for an escape attempt.

"Hmm, I think that I will be more capable of making her answer for her crimes than you." Kaiser said finally, tapping his lips.

"You do not have the facilities to hold a Tinker of her caliber." Armsmaster shot back.

"I really think that we do." Kaiser drawled.

Then my phone rang.

I pulled it out of my pocket. Unidentified number. I glanced at Victor. Stacy gave me this phone, I assumed it was on his say so. Victor wasn't looking at me, focused on the Wards and Armsmaster instead.

I put the phone to my ear, backing up and keeping the legs of my jetpack focused on the four heroes as Kaiser and Armsmaster continued to talk.

"Mayhem speaking, who is this?" I asked.

"My identity is unimportant. What is important is that I know about your 'contingency' to deal with the E88." A male voice said.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, dumping my adrenaline reserve into my bloodstream so I had more time to think. It was too early to use that. I still had things I needed the E88 for. Fixing Sveta, buying anti-Master tech. Support structure, a new lab…

"You know what I'm talking about. And the E88 will know too if you don't activate it now." The voice ordered.

"I need time for that. Twenty four hours, at least." I told the voice on the other end of the phone. I couldn't activate it now. The E88 were spread all over the city.

"I'm going to send evidence of what you've done to Kaiser in ten minutes. Whether or not he gets that evidence is up to you." The voice on the other end of the line said.

"But I can't effect Hookwolf in his Changer form!" I said, in a voice between a shout and a whisper. Victor turned around, and looked at me oddly.

The line clicked, and the phone call ended.

I gulped. Rune was the only available flier… no, Kaiser would knock me out of the sky by growing metal from my jetpack, or just kill me. I don't think I could hit Kaiser and Rune at the same time, not reliably.

"Kaiser, Hookwolf got caught in one of Bakuda's bombs." I said.

"Why didn't I hear of that?" Victor asked, as I rose into the sky on my jetpack and rocket boots.

I didn't answer him, instead I pushed myself up, then cut the thrust so I dropped down one street over, a double line of warehouses between me and Kaiser. I flared the thrusters before I struck the ground, blew out a window with my arm cannon, and jumped through it.

"Primo Victoria." I enunciated clearly.

Now I just needed to survive the eight minutes it would take for the E88 as an organization to cease to exist.

 

[Jurric]

Theo woke up slowly, and tasted something odd in his mouth. Something like pure salt, too strong to be pleasant. He could hear Aster crying in the other room. He should probably get up and find out what she was crying about, but he was having trouble moving. His extremities were numb, his arms and legs only responding slowly to his demands.

Slowly he opened his eyes, glancing around the room. Everything was the same as he left it when the exhaustion came over him. It had come on quickly, he'd barely had a chance to sit on the couch before falling asleep. A whiff of bad gas or something? He was out of shape, but he normally didn't get tired that quickly.

Then the new Tinker walked in through the kitchen door, white lab coat torn and covered in blood. His right hand red up to the wrist, his left hand missing below the elbow, torn off by something that had done to his left side what a cheese grater would do to soft butter.

Rough bandages seeped slowly as the Tinker put a bowl of something down on the side table, pulled some string from his coat pocket, sat on the recliner opposite Theo's couch, and put a needle into his mouth so he could thread it.

Theo watched as slowly his body started obeying him again. He couldn't stop his leg twitching as it was suddenly struck by pins and needles.

"Deal with the baby." Mayhem ordered, as he began to stitch together the stump of his left arm.

Theo gulped, and managed to find the energy to rise. The lethargy was leaving him swiftly. He walked through the kitchen, past a fridge with a bloody hand print on the door, a stove top that looked like it had been used to cook some sort of green sludge, and into Aster's room. He picked her up, rocked her slowly.

Aster was easy enough to quiet. She'd been thirsty, so Theo went back into the kitchen, found a bottle, and gave it to her. He left her in her crib, walked into the bathroom, and found the well equipped medical kit that Kayden kept on the top shelf, then Theo slowly when back into the living room. With the insane, blood covered bio-Tinker.

Mayhem had never seemed quite right to Theo. His emotions fluctuated without outside influence, he spent most of his time lost in some Tinker world, dreaming up ways to better butcher his own mind. They'd only spoken a few times. Once at a formal occasion, when Theo had been charged with showing the boy around Medhall, and another time, when Rune had dragged him over to watch movies together, probably trying to establish some sort of Empire youth club.

"Here sir." Theo said, holding out the medical kit, conscious of his body language so it didn't seem aggressive or defensive, just passive. Mayhem mumbled to himself as he grabbed the case, fumbled it open on his lap, and then began wrapping bandages around his left side.

"Do you need help?" Theo asked.

"No. Get me a stapler." Mayhem ordered, resting his left arm in the bowl he'd placed on the side table earlier. The liquid inside hissed and spat, turning pink with his blood.

"I… I'm sorry about your arm." Theo said, opening a desk drawer, fishing around inside and gratefully closing his hand on a small stapler.

"I already have ideas for replacements." Mayhem said, snatching the stapler from Theo's hand and wincing slightly as he fumbled it open and started driving staples into the stump of his hand, reinforcing the stitching and holding down several bandages.

"If I can ask… what happened?" Theo said.

"Hookwolf. I thought I had the bastard. Told him the bomb went off, and it was a bio-weapon designed specifically to target capes. Told him that I was immune, because bio-tinker, and he was immune in his changer form, tried to take him back to the clinic. Tried to make him to take a 'vaccine.' He was wary though. Victor told him something, in those last moments. Some, I don't know? Text message, phone call? I was hiding, didn't get the whole story."

Theo gulped again.

"How did you get away?" He asked.

"I can fly. Hookwolf can't. That damned… I could have got everyone but Alabaster, just needed to trigger the toxin while everyone was asleep, in bed, when Hookwolf was in human form. He would have woken up in the Birdcage. But no. They made me do it now. Alabaster was fine. Alabaster I could fight, but Hookwolf!"

Mayhem sighed, collapsed deeper into the armchair. It didn't look comfortable, he hadn't taken off the weird… snake things that stuck out of his back, and then were keeping him from fully resting in the chair.

"I'm too tired to make a proper disinfectant. There was some vodka in the kitchen. Get it for me." Mayhem ordered.

Theo got up, found the half empty bottle, and bought it back, handing it to Mayhem carefully. Mayhem snatched the bottle, and tipped it over his left side slowly.

"That has to hurt." Theo said, carefully sitting down on the sofa.

"Not a bit." Mayhem replied, leaning his mask back against the chair's headrest.

Theo paused, swallowed what he was going to say next, changed tactics.

"Why did you come here?" Theo asked.

Mayhem slowly shook his head, lifted the stump of his arm out of the pink chemical pool, and rested it on the side of the chair. Theo almost mentioned the way the chair was staining, but thought better of it.

"Nowhere else to go. PRT probably still has my house staked out. Hookwolf is at the clinic. He doesn't know that I know about this place though. I only came here once. But it was here or Rune's house, and I didn't tag Krieg's wife." Mayhem said.

Theo nodded.

"Tag?" He asked.

"I needed a way to take out the E88. I never believed in the racism bullshit. Just needed money. Resources… didn't want to get sucked in. So I made myself insurance. It's not just a tazer in my right hand, there's also a dendrotoxin. Soaks in through the skin and sits in the bone until a specific radio frequency acts as a catalyst. Then it goes back into the blood stream, makes it's way up the brain. Bam. Instant coma. You were in one until I woke you up. Safe as houses, only tricky part was making myself immune. "

Mayhem held up his right hand. Waved it a bit, and let it flop back down.

"Works on everyone who's hand I shook. Everyone who's back I patted. Everyone who's wounds I treated. No maximum dose, just twelve years in a coma for every time I touched the person I wanted affected. You remember my initiation? I shook hands with every powered member of the E88. While fighting at Hookwolf's ring I slapped, shook hands with or treated the wounds of every violent criminal in the Empire."

"That's a very clever device." Theo said slowly.

"You know the best part?" Mayhem said, smiling with a slight tint of mania. "The best part is, this toxin, it leaves a pale patch behind on pigmented skin. Light skin, no visible effect whatsoever. Dark skin… I couldn't have pulled this off. Ironic, isn't it."

"It is." Theo said softly.

"If the Empire was multicultural, I wouldn't have been able to take them down. Well, nearly, Asian skin is still too pale for the effects of the dendrotoxin to be noticeable. Indian, Aboriginal or African decent pretty much required. And I could have probably solved that problem with the toxin given another day or so. Still. Lack of diversity leads to downfall." Mayhem said, too brightly for the circumstances.

"So Purity won't wake up for another twelve years?" Theo asked.

"Unless I wake her, yes. It's in the brain, so not even Panacea could fix this. Cranial might be able to. Might. I don't think anyone else could. Of course I can make the antidote, but I'm the only one."

Theo nodded. Still processing the new information. Trying to figure out if the loss of everyone who he ever knew was a good or a bad thing.

"Yes sir. I guess it does. What about Purity?"

"Unconscious on the rooftop. I picked her up while I collected Hookwolf. Grabbed her and ran when he attacked me."

"Why?"

"Because she's one of the few who can take Hookwolf in a fair fight." Mayhem said.

Theo resisted the urge to glance at the room where Aster was still sucking happily at her bottle. How exactly Mayhem planned to convince Purtity to attack Hookwolf was left unsaid, but it could be easily inferred. Then Theo looked at Mayhem himself. A thin, scrawny, blonde boy, not much older than Theo himself, but muscles stood out in fine definition on his remaining arm, and a scalpel looped lazily through his fingers.

Even if he was a nearly unarmed Tinker, an unarmed, overweight boy attacking a cape was suicidal, and Theo didn't like the way that the snake things coming out of Mayhem's back moved to track him as he had walked in and out of the room.

"Did you know she wanted to be a vigilante?" Theo asked.

Mayhem paused.

"She did?"

"She spent years trying to get out from under Kaiser's shadow. She only joined the Empire again because Kaiser promised to hand it over to her in a year if she wasn't convinced he was doing the right thing. If… if you explained things to her, if you told her what you've done, she'd probably be on your side. She never wanted to hurt her friends, but she knew they deserve to go to jail. This, this is a neat solution. She can help you, fight of Hookwolf, you can be a team. Maybe." Theo said, trying to be as convincing as possible.

Mayhem snorted.

"I wish I could trust you. I wish trusting you would made a difference. Bring your mother in, set her up the couch. Make sure the baby has plenty to eat and drink over the next eight hours. I'm having a nap. If you get near me, I will wake up, and I will hurt you. You try to use the phone. I wake up. I hurt you." Mayhem said, twirling the scalpel again, before letting it rest between his fingers.

"Oh. One last thing. Put the TV on. Watch it. Keep up with what's happening. I want to stay in the loop." Mayhem ordered. Then his breathing started to slow down, and Theo slowly and quietly stood up, and made his way to the roof.

Purity was there. Apparently unhurt, but she didn't wake up when Theo shook her. Theo stared at her for a minute, before getting under her shoulders and dragging her inside, putting her on the couch opposite Mayhem. The he turned the TV on. The sound didn't seem to bother Mayhem, who still looked like he was sleeping, so Theo went into the kitchen, found a pair of rubber gloves, and carefully put the green goop into a plastic container. Then he did the dishes. After the second rack Aster needed burping, so he took her as far from the lounge room as he could, and burped her.

He packed a backpack with water, food and the small emergency supply of cash that Purity kept under the kitchen sink. Then he finished the dishes, wiped the blood off the fridge, and examined the broken apartment door. He couldn't do anything about the broken wood, but he could wipe the blood off the door knob.

He went into Aster's room, swaddled her, packed a change of diaper in his backpack, and tried to figure out how to put on a baby carrier.

"You can leave if you want." Mayhem yelled from the lounge. Theo jumped, caught his hand in the strap of the complex arrangement of straps, and then nearly feel as he unbalanced himself.

"It's too late." Mayhem said sadly.

Theo focused on the news report.

Something about the Protectorate taking down Hookwolf at a local clinic, and a cleanup crew being sent there afterward. They were saying something about hazardous chemicals.

"This is the second lab I lost, almost as soon as I finished setting up." Mayhem said, his voice dripping anger. "I was so close. Two days. Two days and I could have had Sveta in cybernetics. Three and I'd have been able to reinforce my legs. Four and I would have started building a full body replacement surgery. Seven, and I would have been ready to…"

He sighed. Theo moved closer, and tried to hear the muttering that Mayhem had degenerated into.

"…did manage to extend the maximum safe duration, and the ethics subroutines tested just fine. Mayhem, slow burn mode, objectives: Survive, get Sveta and my lab equipment back. Time, one day. Activate."

Theo gulped. Mayhem had said he could leave. He should leave. Grab Aster and run, but Purity was still asleep on the couch, and he wasn't sure if just leaving her was the best option available.

"One day? Dear Adam. I told you I would rise from your ashes, but you are not burned up yet."

His choice was made for him when Mayhem rose, and crossed the room in swift strides.

"Good news Son of Clay. The Lady of Light is one I shall approach on my own two feet, not with a dagger at her true heart. Allow yourself to molded once more. Stay within these walls, and I will wake her when I return."

"Yes sir." Theo said, shrinking away from the madman.

Mayhem tilted his neck, twisting to look at Theo lengthwise with the odd fabric mask, then stalked around him, circling once. Theo kept his hands at his sides, slowly shrinking in on himself.

"Hide inside your shell then turtle of lies. Fear the world and it's wonders. But if you keep your losses shallow your victories will be Pyrrhic." Mayhem said, hissing the final word. Then he took a small vial from an interior pocket, and gave it to Theo.

"What is this, sir?" Theo asked.

"Liquid dreams." Mayhem said.

"What… what do you want me to do?" Theo asked.

"Drink."