Chapter 15 - April 11, 2011
Sunday had ended up being a day of chores, with Taylor happy that her father had done most of the running up and down the stairs with laundry baskets portion of things. She'd still done a fair share of moving around, granted, but she'd mostly avoided lots of stair climbing. But by Monday morning her legs seemed to have recovered fully, the last lingering bits of pain having subsided. Which was nice, because dealing with the pain while in tutoring would've been extra annoying. The chairs weren't exactly the most comfortable, though the Knight Clothing spell helped a little.
Her father spent half an hour on the phone after their morning run, then came back into the kitchen, shaking his head. "I have no clue if I'll be home for dinner. Frank's not back yet, or if he is he isn't answering the phone, and the city apparently wants to move up a meeting he was supposed to participate in to this afternoon. My morning will probably be figuring out his paperwork instead of getting my own stuff done, and I have a pile of things that I need done before tomorrow."
Taylor nodded. "So I'm probably on my own for dinner?"
"Yeah. If I'm actually leaving reasonably on time I'll call."
They finished breakfast in silence and then both got ready for their days.
Taylor had been let go to get lunch early when the lights failed in the room they were using. That probably wouldn't have been enough, given that there were other rooms they could just move to, if it hadn't been for the smell of smoke. They preferred to have her out of the building while they called someone to get over there right away.
Luckily for her, she hadn't brought a lunch today as an excuse to head out to get something to eat and do some quick shopping. Now she had plenty of time to browse instead of just grabbing a couple of things in a rush. As a result of that she picked up two different first aid kits and a couple different kinds of painkillers from several different stores, storing each purchase while on her way from store to store when she had a chance to do so out of sight.
She'd originally planned on spreading things out a little more, but when she'd purchased the smaller of the first aid kits the shopkeeper had noted that larger versions were available at the larger store they were affiliated with. Which seemed like a wonderful excuse to just go get one. And then she'd run into an ad for a different type of painkiller than what they usually had at home, after she'd picked a bottle up for her own use already, and she'd opted to get a bottle of it as well in case it worked better. The limited effect of the usual stuff had annoyed her all weekend.
Adding in actually obtaining and eating lunch had resulted in her barely getting back before the end of her extended lunch break, only to find that they weren't ready for her to return. She ended up sitting outside for an extra fifteen minutes, eating the bag of chips that had come with her lunch that she'd stored when she didn't think she'd have time to eat them. Eventually they declared the building wasn't going to catch fire due to whatever it was had been wrong, but she ended up in a different room down the hall with working lights while they waited for someone to show up with what was needed to fix the problem in the other one.
They'd all but kicked Taylor out of the building when her last session ended, since apparently they needed to do something with a circuit breaker sub-panel and that was going to kill everything on the floor. Which meant that she wasn't permitted to stick around to use the computers, but she didn't really mind. She did detour slightly to purchase some snacks and no-refrigeration-needed drinks on her way home, storing them like she'd stored the first aid stuff earlier. Just because having snacks on demand appealed to her, having picked up the idea when she'd stored the chips earlier.
Once home she'd stopped in the middle of setting up her cameras to look at the phone. "I'm going to need something right here to hear if he calls, aren't I?"
Hive didn't bother to say anything, obviously recognizing the question as rhetorical. A 'camera' was easily dropped right over the phone before Taylor went upstairs, though longer-term solutions to 'answer the phone while not in the house' was getting added to the list of things to look into.
Hoping to get into a good habit and avoid surprises, Taylor dropped a sensor drone onto the beach that they'd been using for testing before heading over. There was a light rain, but no severe winds and the sun was peeking through the clouds in several places. Nodding to herself, Taylor transferred over. Hive immediately shifted forms and moved off to the side while Taylor cast the Knight Armor spell.
"What do you have there?" Taylor asked as she walked over to Hive, who'd started retrieving semi-cylindrical devices from storage. Eight of them, each identical in appearance. The ends were hexagons, with a 'taper' around them that appeared to be sensor systems leading to the wider 'main body'. Three feet wide at the ends, four at the main body, and around six feet long in total. Both of the hexagons in the ends appeared to have some kind of emitter system and there were a number of additional 'pads' along the six sides of the main body.
"These are the training aids I've been working on," Hive replied. "Semi-autonomous drones, capable of storing several spell equations and having a sizable mana battery. I've loaded them with homing bullet and basic beam equations. They should provide far more of a challenge than me firing at you alone, but we should probably use one to start with for initial testing."
"That makes sense."
The first half hour was using one of the training drones, Hive adjusting the programming to correct things. Then they added in two more, with more adjustments needed to keep them working together. They only got up to seven of the eight due to a friendly fire incident taking one down early on. Taylor was thus flying around like a madwoman dodging and blocking attacks, wishing that she'd come up with a more mobile shield before now. Meanwhile Hive was working on other things, starting with confirming all of the calibration tests that Taylor had done in simulation and correcting things where they didn't line up with reality.
Some of those tests had involved shooting homing beams at Taylor, just to make things more interesting. The first few had missed greatly due to errors in the calibration, of course, but the later ones were a horror to deal with. And there was a good chance that the training drones would get that spell added to their collection at some point in the future. Figuring out a portable shield was being bumped up the list as a result, even if Hive would later claim that there was far too much on-the-fly calculating happening to make the homing beams 'viable' right now.
When Hive had finished calibration tests she started working on something else, but eventually the training drones shut down due to detecting that Taylor's Knight Armor was too weakened to continue. The fixed-position hex shields weren't enough for that kind of assault, and who knew what kinds of situations she'd eventually find herself in. More mobile shields were definitely going to be needed going forward.
Taylor landed on the beach and pulled out a chocolate chip granola bar from her snack stash as she walked over to where Hive was working. She'd just finished the snack when a gust of wind pulled the wrapper out of her hand. Frowning, and not wanting to litter on another planet entirely, she wrapped a storage spell in a homing bullet and fired it off. A moment later it hit the wrapper, which appeared in her storage space. She'd throw it out later.
"Lord?" Hive said a moment later. "What was that?"
Blinking, Taylor was mildly surprised that she'd developed that spell set and Hive hadn't actually noticed. "Storage spell wrapped in a homing bullet."
"Combining those two equations without crossing the targeting parameters between the storage spell and the homing bullet is impressive. May I ask how you did so?"
Shrugging, Taylor pushed all of the equations she'd come up with for wrapped versus wrapper to Hive. "Long story short, I didn't."
The device tilted her head as she examined the spells, before nodding. "Very interesting. I hadn't considered doing that kind of thing as two distinct spells, but I can see how you likely based it on the multilayer Dimensional Transference. More overall energy is required, but the added flexibility and ease of casting the individual spells would easily make up for that. But why do you have wrapped versions of the wrappers?"
"So that I can fire an untargeted bullet that fires a homing bullet that holds a Dimensional Transference. Or something crazy like that. Who knows what we'll come up with eventually."
Hive blinked, then looked out at the water. The rain had stopped, but the seven training drones hadn't returned on their own. A moment later the device had fired off seven bullets, each of which homed in on one of the training drones. Hive smiled as each one hit and the respective drone vanished. "That is very useful, my Lord." She then looked back at Taylor, smile changing to a grin. A flash of light later and a box appeared. Inside were what appeared to be a dozen cylinders.
"What are these?" Taylor asked, picking one up. She immediately felt that there were controls inside, but avoided triggering them. The one she'd picked up was mostly black with a gel-filled grip. One end was rounded and the other had a silver cap with a number of holes in it.
"Cutting multitools."
Taylor looked at Hive, raising an eyebrow. "Cutting multitools?"
"They have a nanotech disassembler, a mana blade, and a plasma blade as options. Variable length and color."
Very carefully, Taylor made sure that she was holding the thing such that it shouldn't hit anything. Then hit what she thought was the 'on' switch. A blue mana blade sprung forth. 'Twisting' another control had the blade shift around to a purple color. Looking at it, Taylor sighed. "Really?"
"I was inspired, Lord, and the hardest part was getting the color adjustment working. I'll admit that I might've gotten carried away with making them." Hive then floated over to the box and pulled a blue one with the six-blade design on the end out. "I think this one matches your Knight Armor the best."
Taylor turned off the one she'd first picked up and took the offered one. It certainly worked better color-wise. "Did you make yourself a pink version of this one?" A flash of light later and Hive was holding one. "I see. And why did you make so many others?"
"I was experimenting with designs. They're relatively inexpensive to make from a materials standpoint and don't require any advanced computing."
"Well, I suppose that having a bunch of the things would be wonderful for bragging rights at a minimum. Eventually. Maybe. What else did you decide needed to be made real from the movies?"
Hive frowned. "I know that simple pulling and pushing of things is possible, I just haven't recreated any of the equations yet. Being able to do so would make it far harder to disarm you, so that's on my list of plans."
Taylor blinked at that, then grinned and threw the 'cutting tool' she was holding off to the side. A moment later it was hit by a bullet and reappeared in her hand. "That seems like less of an issue right now, to be honest."
"How did...oh. You used the storage and retrieval spell without actually targeting the storage area. That's clever, if limited in range. But I think that a more general telekinesis spell is still a good project."
"Yeah, I can see that. I certainly won't complain if you come up with something workable."
That evening's overnight project was getting Taylor up to speed on the basics of the design of the training drones and cutting tools. Calling the latter that was an attempt to stay in the habit of not being sued, especially after they found legal cases where tinkers had been able to get away with making similar items so long as they used a generic name. Granted, said tinkers also tended to have problems with the plasma containment failing in horrible ways. For the user in particular, but the general area as well in a couple of cases.
Hive promised that wasn't going to be a significant problem with these ones and spent a good hour going over the redundant safeties that had been put in on that front as proof. The mana-based containment wrapper was incredibly straightforward and essentially a barrier in and of itself, able to block various kinds of attacks. It rendered the plasma blade mode useless against anyone using mana-based barriers, but that was fine with Taylor.
The other two modes on those were 'proven' from the halberd designs and had their own utility. Nanotech disassembly was far less destructive than the plasma interacting with other things, for example, and the mana blade could be used in various modes depending on how the user tweaked the equation. Being the only mode that could do anything significant to mana-based barriers meant that Taylor was happy that it defaulted to 'training stun'.
Then there were the training drones, and on the surface they were incredibly straightforward. A basic flight system based on how Hive's own flight worked, simple monitoring and targeting routines, a mana battery, and a simple list of equations to fire from either emitter set. Internally they were a lot more complicated, having multiple levels of redundancy on pretty much everything. Twelve mana batteries so that damaging any eleven would still allow some functionality, three emitter arrays at either end, generic and dedicated sensor systems. The safeties could also be disabled, meaning that they'd continue to attack until destroyed, their batteries ran dry, or they were manually called off. But switching from 'training stun' to 'lethal' on the spell front required loading new equations in entirely.
Unlike Hive, or even Hal, none of the new stuff had a 'self repair' option. If it was damaged then Hive needed to repair it for now, but Taylor was hoping to at least be able to diagnose things by the time she was forty. If she was lucky and had been able to set aside going out and doing things herself. Maybe.
There was a very good chance that diagnosis and repair would always fall to Hive.
Tuesday morning Taylor was informed that the previous day's problems had been caused by an unauthorized monitoring device that'd been improperly installed in one of the light fixtures. They'd done a sweep of the entire floor and removed several others. They'd even given her the outer casing of one of them, on the basis that if someone was trying to spy on her then she might need to be on the lookout for them.
Hive spent most of the morning examining the thing and seemed very happy with some of the results. Apparently the 'outer casing' contained microcircuitry or something like that that hadn't necessarily been noticed when they'd gutted the interior.
Taylor had originally planned on bringing lunch with her, but Hive had asked her to pick up a cheap phone. She thought she knew what needed to be done to interface with the phone line, but figured that it was easy enough to obtain a simple phone and be positive since temporarily storing and dismantling their current phone had been rejected. Taylor didn't mind the minor expense, but ran into the problem of 'cheap phone' and 'the Boardwalk' not meshing well. She ended up getting a basic cordless phone instead, figuring that knowing how the more complicated circuitry worked wouldn't be a horrible thing. That was slipped into her bag, and she stopped in a nearby restroom before getting her lunch so that Hive could store it without anyone being likely to notice.
That done, Taylor ate her lunch and returned for her afternoon lessons while Hive tore apart the phone and ensured that she could build something to interface properly with the phone line.
Sadly, after reaching home that afternoon Taylor came to the conclusion that she probably didn't have time to train with Hive. She'd been delayed in leaving tutoring, then detoured a bit to avoid an altercation between various groups of thugs. She thought it was the Merchants and the ABB, but wasn't positive. The Empire might've been involved as well for all she knew, since she tried to skirt the edge of the whole thing.
Even without time to head off before her father would likely be home, she was hoping that she could get the 'answer the phone from anywhere' solution installed.
"So what do you have?" Taylor asked as she poured a glass of juice for herself.
A moment later the cordless phone box appeared, seemingly unopened, on the counter next to her. Blinking, Taylor put the juice away before picking up the box. She opened it up and found that it appeared to contain the cordless phone as described on the outside of the box and nothing more. She couldn't find anything out of place.
Giving up on figuring it out, she sighed. "So where's the new device?"
"That is the new device, my Lord," Hive responded. "On the outside it looks normal, but I replaced most of the internals. It's much less likely that someone will disconnect this from the line than anything else I could make to attach elsewhere."
"Oh. So you can redirect this to me whenever needed?"
"Yes. Or you can simply bring the handset with you."
Blinking, Taylor looked down at the phone. "You made a cross-dimensional cordless phone that doesn't feel like it relies on mana?"
"I considered using Shard-style functionality to accomplish that, but opted for the simpler solution of replacing the base to handset communication so that it can use the existing relay device to ensure that it will work so long as the handset is close enough to a communication-capable device, such as myself or one of the watches."
"Oh." That made a lot more sense, and sounded like it was a lot simpler.
With a sigh, Taylor ensured that she had everything unpacked and started setting up the phone in the hallway. The battery went into the phone easily enough and had a full charge, though whether it had come that way or was an upgrade from Hive she couldn't say. There was an outlet on the wall there as well, giving her a place to plug the base station in. She gave it a quick test when she'd hooked the phone line up and got a dial tone, so she figured it was all installed correctly enough.
Hive then spent twenty minutes walking her through how she could use her watch as though it were the handset, communicating through to the base station itself as though it were a second handset tied to it. Despite the original circuitry not supporting additional handsets at all, of course. The overall procedure was fairly straightforward, but there was an 'access code' needed to make it harder for anyone else to piggy-back on it. Whether or not anyone would ever try was debatable.
Taylor ended up starting on dinner after that, figuring that she might as well do so. After informing Hive that unless her father was going to throw out the old phone that they shouldn't dismantle it. Not that Hive thought that anything of significant use would come from doing so as much as she wanted 'direct confirmation' that it worked the way she thought it did internally. Eventually Taylor just grabbed the phone and headed upstairs so that Hive could cast a few scanning spells at it.
Later that evening Taylor ended up shaking her head, relieved that she'd gotten lucky. She'd not considered having any explanation for purchasing the phone at all, since she was expecting to be installing a new something along the phone lines and not replacing their phone. Instead she found herself at a loss when her father had noted the phone, only realizing at that moment that she didn't have a good excuse for having obtained it at all. Apparently she didn't have to worry about that, though, because he'd provided a suitable justification himself before she could say anything in the first place.
Really, it made a lot of sense that being able to bring the handset up to her room when possibly expecting him to call would be far easier than having to run downstairs to answer the phone. He'd even apologized for not having thought of it himself, before taking the now-spare phone upstairs and setting it up in his room. She hadn't known there was a jack in there, but it meant that she had less distance to travel if the phone rang while the cordless handset was downstairs.
"Might want to turn the oven down or shorten the cook time slightly on this next time," her father said as they ate. She'd burnt things. A little, mostly on the surface. "But otherwise it's not bad."
She nodded. "Thanks."
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, before he suddenly blinked and looked at her. "I almost forgot. Do me a favor and watch yourself on your trips home for the rest of the week. The city's having the Dockworkers remove several traffic lights on your likely route home. Cheaper than having the company putting new ones in do so, or so I was told. They'll be starting tomorrow. Supposedly most of the work should be done by the end of next week, just in time for your week off to be over, though I don't know how they got it set up as a rush job."
Taylor shrugged. "Maybe someone noticed that at least one of the walk lights was completely nonfunctional and it became a safety issue."
"I don't see why that would result in working over intersections across several blocks. Either that or this was longer in coming than I was led to believe and they only realized they needed things removed on short notice. It isn't like the Dockworkers are putting the new ones in. Just watch yourself if they're working when you pass through."
"I will."
After dinner Taylor and her father sat down in the living room to watch the news together. It turned out that one of the Merchant capes had attacked a Wards patrol and pissed off members of the Protectorate had gone to the rescue, and that had ballooned into a multiple gang altercation. Due to 'on the scene' details being scarce, though, the majority of the coverage was an angry Youth Guard representative. It took half an hour before they even found out that it'd been Aegis and Clockblocker on the patrol in question, and the two had returned effectively uninjured.
"I don't think the Wards are going to be happy about the Youth Guard cutting their patrols even more," Taylor finally said, causing her father to look at her. "Vista complained about some of that when she bought me lunch."
He nodded. "Yeah, I can see how that could be annoying for them. But it's all for their safety, right?"
She shrugged, honestly not knowing what was or wasn't for the best in this situation.
That night Taylor spent time browsing the Internet, still not having many good ideas for a cape name, while also using the simulation system to practice swinging around an energy blade in a safe environment. Hive was making a few more training drones and using some of the multitasking system with a set of sensor drones to try and figure out where mana-using civilizations may or may not be in relation to their current position. Something about using a number of spread out sensors to try and act like a much larger single system.
She wasn't having any luck, but wasn't willing to give up trying either. The sad thing was, she honestly didn't know if there was anything to find, having little to no clue about how long it'd been. Not knowing which direction to look didn't help either, and there were a lot of directions to check. Most of them not represented in normal three-dimensional space.
Focusing on weapon practice, Taylor had quickly come to the conclusion that without her own sensors helping her keep track of things that she'd be more of a risk to herself than to anyone she was fighting. It was far too easy to swing the blade in a way that would intersect her own body, something which would be unpleasant at best in the real world. In real combat it would be horrible. She probably needed to avoid trying to seriously fight with the thing until she had a lot more practice.
How to get that practice without anyone else available was an entirely different problem, because it wasn't like she could find a random swordsman or something and just practice with them. Not when her 'blade' was pretty much not solid to anything that anyone else she was aware of would be using. Sadly, in two of the three modes it was also pretty much guaranteed to be lethal to others. Perhaps leaving the thing as a 'cutting multitool' instead of an 'energy blade' was the right choice, only pulling it out when she needed cutting power more than for combat?
You know, aside from the fact that a previously-unknown inner sci-fi geek was screaming at her that it was too cool not to have available for fighting. Even if only to show up all the tinkers who'd failed to build a reliable one over the years, proving that...er...well, that her device was better than theirs, she guessed. Now that she thought about it and all, it wasn't like she'd built the things.
Sighing to herself in the simulation, she dismissed the simulated cutting tool and shut down the simulator to focus more on the portions of her researching for name ideas as well as those who might've used similar names and all. She'd already decided that the latin 'sex-' prefix was a no-go for blatantly obvious reasons. The greek 'hexa-' had seemed like a good choice at first, until she'd realized that a 'hex-' prefix would be mildly villainous in certain connotations. Worse, 'Hex' was a name used by an active villain. Which had removed a whole slew of possible names from her list.
Switching gears to more of a 'blade' or 'bladed weapon' theme to go with the six blade design she'd plastered all over the Knight Armor didn't take long before she ran into the problem of a lot of parahumans naming themselves after the specific weapon they'd chosen to use, and they didn't tend to ensure that they were the only one doing so. There were at least nine 'Halberd' parahumans that PHO knew about, not counting 'Halbeard' which both jokingly referred to Armsmaster and was apparently the name of a parahuman in Mexico. Four 'Polearms', twelve 'Spears', three 'Lances'. The list went on. Oddly, the only one on the list that nobody seemed to have claimed was 'maul'. She'd have thought a villain would've grabbed it for the other meaning.
Going with a name that started or ended in 'blade' itself had seemed like it could work, until she'd started running into news reports when checking on her initial ideas. It seemed like including the words 'blade', 'edge', or 'slash' in your name was a wonderful way to get personally targeted by Jack Slash. If you survived then you had his approval to keep the name, but it seemed like a very poor choice if you'd spotted the pattern. Especially as only two of the thirty or so thus targeted had survived.
It didn't take much searching to find that those who claimed to use 'magic', by name or otherwise, tended to be scoffed at. Even people like Myrddin who were generally respected weren't given a free pass there. Then there were various groups that liked to claim they were magic users and targeted those that fit their themes, one of which was in New York. Which was definitely close enough to make a trip to target her. Even if they hadn't targeted Rune, who seemed to play up a semi-magical angle here in the Bay. Though perhaps they didn't think they could work with a modern-day Nazi? Still, probably best to not tempt fate there, at least not with her choice of cape name.
Perhaps it was time to give up on the themed names entirely and go with something completely disconnected from what she was capable of? It wasn't like the Triumvirate had names that actually said anything about their powers, after all. Which meant picking something that she might be happy being called. And was 'suitably heroic', hopefully without falling into 'pretentious'. Probably while avoiding asian or germanic words, given the gangs in the immediate area. No need to accidentally associate herself with either of them, right?
She ended up finding a couple of sites that listed words and names that allowed her to filter things appropriately. Of course, it then turned out that either a number of capes had the same idea or her 'pick something not themed' idea was running against 'the names can still be themed for someone else'. The first eighty things she decided sounded like they were workable turned out to be used, and most of them were in use by villains. Granted, a number of them weren't in North America, and thus she probably could've gotten away with using them, but she was being picky on that front.
Eventually she found a set of names that didn't come up in relation to parahumans at all, though a couple of them surprised her on that front. She probably shouldn't complain. They were also 'plain' enough to explain why people hadn't been using them. And the more she thought about it, the more a simple name appealed to her. After all, by current legal definitions she wasn't actually a parahuman. She was verifiably a standard human biologically and didn't have a corona pollentia or gemma, after all.
Looking things over, she did some deeper checks and further narrowed things down. Removing any that were too common, for example, as well as anything definitively masculine. An entire group was removed due to coming up too often in porn, one way or another. She finally narrowed it down to 'Lilia' and 'Minerva'. The latter was theoretically pretentious, even if it had been used as a normal name, due to the whole goddess connection. The former instead linked to flowers. Flowers with six petals, though, so it had that going for it.
It didn't take much thought to decide that the whole link between flowers and sex meant that Lilia was probably a poor choice. As such, she figured that she'd go with Minerva, and even made a mental note to add a 'patch' on her Knight Armor with the name just to drive it, and its spelling, home. Might reduce the number of times she had to introduce herself too, for that matter.
Her father spent half an hour on the phone after their morning run, then came back into the kitchen, shaking his head. "I have no clue if I'll be home for dinner. Frank's not back yet, or if he is he isn't answering the phone, and the city apparently wants to move up a meeting he was supposed to participate in to this afternoon. My morning will probably be figuring out his paperwork instead of getting my own stuff done, and I have a pile of things that I need done before tomorrow."
Taylor nodded. "So I'm probably on my own for dinner?"
"Yeah. If I'm actually leaving reasonably on time I'll call."
They finished breakfast in silence and then both got ready for their days.
Taylor had been let go to get lunch early when the lights failed in the room they were using. That probably wouldn't have been enough, given that there were other rooms they could just move to, if it hadn't been for the smell of smoke. They preferred to have her out of the building while they called someone to get over there right away.
Luckily for her, she hadn't brought a lunch today as an excuse to head out to get something to eat and do some quick shopping. Now she had plenty of time to browse instead of just grabbing a couple of things in a rush. As a result of that she picked up two different first aid kits and a couple different kinds of painkillers from several different stores, storing each purchase while on her way from store to store when she had a chance to do so out of sight.
She'd originally planned on spreading things out a little more, but when she'd purchased the smaller of the first aid kits the shopkeeper had noted that larger versions were available at the larger store they were affiliated with. Which seemed like a wonderful excuse to just go get one. And then she'd run into an ad for a different type of painkiller than what they usually had at home, after she'd picked a bottle up for her own use already, and she'd opted to get a bottle of it as well in case it worked better. The limited effect of the usual stuff had annoyed her all weekend.
Adding in actually obtaining and eating lunch had resulted in her barely getting back before the end of her extended lunch break, only to find that they weren't ready for her to return. She ended up sitting outside for an extra fifteen minutes, eating the bag of chips that had come with her lunch that she'd stored when she didn't think she'd have time to eat them. Eventually they declared the building wasn't going to catch fire due to whatever it was had been wrong, but she ended up in a different room down the hall with working lights while they waited for someone to show up with what was needed to fix the problem in the other one.
They'd all but kicked Taylor out of the building when her last session ended, since apparently they needed to do something with a circuit breaker sub-panel and that was going to kill everything on the floor. Which meant that she wasn't permitted to stick around to use the computers, but she didn't really mind. She did detour slightly to purchase some snacks and no-refrigeration-needed drinks on her way home, storing them like she'd stored the first aid stuff earlier. Just because having snacks on demand appealed to her, having picked up the idea when she'd stored the chips earlier.
Once home she'd stopped in the middle of setting up her cameras to look at the phone. "I'm going to need something right here to hear if he calls, aren't I?"
Hive didn't bother to say anything, obviously recognizing the question as rhetorical. A 'camera' was easily dropped right over the phone before Taylor went upstairs, though longer-term solutions to 'answer the phone while not in the house' was getting added to the list of things to look into.
Hoping to get into a good habit and avoid surprises, Taylor dropped a sensor drone onto the beach that they'd been using for testing before heading over. There was a light rain, but no severe winds and the sun was peeking through the clouds in several places. Nodding to herself, Taylor transferred over. Hive immediately shifted forms and moved off to the side while Taylor cast the Knight Armor spell.
"What do you have there?" Taylor asked as she walked over to Hive, who'd started retrieving semi-cylindrical devices from storage. Eight of them, each identical in appearance. The ends were hexagons, with a 'taper' around them that appeared to be sensor systems leading to the wider 'main body'. Three feet wide at the ends, four at the main body, and around six feet long in total. Both of the hexagons in the ends appeared to have some kind of emitter system and there were a number of additional 'pads' along the six sides of the main body.
"These are the training aids I've been working on," Hive replied. "Semi-autonomous drones, capable of storing several spell equations and having a sizable mana battery. I've loaded them with homing bullet and basic beam equations. They should provide far more of a challenge than me firing at you alone, but we should probably use one to start with for initial testing."
"That makes sense."
The first half hour was using one of the training drones, Hive adjusting the programming to correct things. Then they added in two more, with more adjustments needed to keep them working together. They only got up to seven of the eight due to a friendly fire incident taking one down early on. Taylor was thus flying around like a madwoman dodging and blocking attacks, wishing that she'd come up with a more mobile shield before now. Meanwhile Hive was working on other things, starting with confirming all of the calibration tests that Taylor had done in simulation and correcting things where they didn't line up with reality.
Some of those tests had involved shooting homing beams at Taylor, just to make things more interesting. The first few had missed greatly due to errors in the calibration, of course, but the later ones were a horror to deal with. And there was a good chance that the training drones would get that spell added to their collection at some point in the future. Figuring out a portable shield was being bumped up the list as a result, even if Hive would later claim that there was far too much on-the-fly calculating happening to make the homing beams 'viable' right now.
When Hive had finished calibration tests she started working on something else, but eventually the training drones shut down due to detecting that Taylor's Knight Armor was too weakened to continue. The fixed-position hex shields weren't enough for that kind of assault, and who knew what kinds of situations she'd eventually find herself in. More mobile shields were definitely going to be needed going forward.
Taylor landed on the beach and pulled out a chocolate chip granola bar from her snack stash as she walked over to where Hive was working. She'd just finished the snack when a gust of wind pulled the wrapper out of her hand. Frowning, and not wanting to litter on another planet entirely, she wrapped a storage spell in a homing bullet and fired it off. A moment later it hit the wrapper, which appeared in her storage space. She'd throw it out later.
"Lord?" Hive said a moment later. "What was that?"
Blinking, Taylor was mildly surprised that she'd developed that spell set and Hive hadn't actually noticed. "Storage spell wrapped in a homing bullet."
"Combining those two equations without crossing the targeting parameters between the storage spell and the homing bullet is impressive. May I ask how you did so?"
Shrugging, Taylor pushed all of the equations she'd come up with for wrapped versus wrapper to Hive. "Long story short, I didn't."
The device tilted her head as she examined the spells, before nodding. "Very interesting. I hadn't considered doing that kind of thing as two distinct spells, but I can see how you likely based it on the multilayer Dimensional Transference. More overall energy is required, but the added flexibility and ease of casting the individual spells would easily make up for that. But why do you have wrapped versions of the wrappers?"
"So that I can fire an untargeted bullet that fires a homing bullet that holds a Dimensional Transference. Or something crazy like that. Who knows what we'll come up with eventually."
Hive blinked, then looked out at the water. The rain had stopped, but the seven training drones hadn't returned on their own. A moment later the device had fired off seven bullets, each of which homed in on one of the training drones. Hive smiled as each one hit and the respective drone vanished. "That is very useful, my Lord." She then looked back at Taylor, smile changing to a grin. A flash of light later and a box appeared. Inside were what appeared to be a dozen cylinders.
"What are these?" Taylor asked, picking one up. She immediately felt that there were controls inside, but avoided triggering them. The one she'd picked up was mostly black with a gel-filled grip. One end was rounded and the other had a silver cap with a number of holes in it.
"Cutting multitools."
Taylor looked at Hive, raising an eyebrow. "Cutting multitools?"
"They have a nanotech disassembler, a mana blade, and a plasma blade as options. Variable length and color."
Very carefully, Taylor made sure that she was holding the thing such that it shouldn't hit anything. Then hit what she thought was the 'on' switch. A blue mana blade sprung forth. 'Twisting' another control had the blade shift around to a purple color. Looking at it, Taylor sighed. "Really?"
"I was inspired, Lord, and the hardest part was getting the color adjustment working. I'll admit that I might've gotten carried away with making them." Hive then floated over to the box and pulled a blue one with the six-blade design on the end out. "I think this one matches your Knight Armor the best."
Taylor turned off the one she'd first picked up and took the offered one. It certainly worked better color-wise. "Did you make yourself a pink version of this one?" A flash of light later and Hive was holding one. "I see. And why did you make so many others?"
"I was experimenting with designs. They're relatively inexpensive to make from a materials standpoint and don't require any advanced computing."
"Well, I suppose that having a bunch of the things would be wonderful for bragging rights at a minimum. Eventually. Maybe. What else did you decide needed to be made real from the movies?"
Hive frowned. "I know that simple pulling and pushing of things is possible, I just haven't recreated any of the equations yet. Being able to do so would make it far harder to disarm you, so that's on my list of plans."
Taylor blinked at that, then grinned and threw the 'cutting tool' she was holding off to the side. A moment later it was hit by a bullet and reappeared in her hand. "That seems like less of an issue right now, to be honest."
"How did...oh. You used the storage and retrieval spell without actually targeting the storage area. That's clever, if limited in range. But I think that a more general telekinesis spell is still a good project."
"Yeah, I can see that. I certainly won't complain if you come up with something workable."
That evening's overnight project was getting Taylor up to speed on the basics of the design of the training drones and cutting tools. Calling the latter that was an attempt to stay in the habit of not being sued, especially after they found legal cases where tinkers had been able to get away with making similar items so long as they used a generic name. Granted, said tinkers also tended to have problems with the plasma containment failing in horrible ways. For the user in particular, but the general area as well in a couple of cases.
Hive promised that wasn't going to be a significant problem with these ones and spent a good hour going over the redundant safeties that had been put in on that front as proof. The mana-based containment wrapper was incredibly straightforward and essentially a barrier in and of itself, able to block various kinds of attacks. It rendered the plasma blade mode useless against anyone using mana-based barriers, but that was fine with Taylor.
The other two modes on those were 'proven' from the halberd designs and had their own utility. Nanotech disassembly was far less destructive than the plasma interacting with other things, for example, and the mana blade could be used in various modes depending on how the user tweaked the equation. Being the only mode that could do anything significant to mana-based barriers meant that Taylor was happy that it defaulted to 'training stun'.
Then there were the training drones, and on the surface they were incredibly straightforward. A basic flight system based on how Hive's own flight worked, simple monitoring and targeting routines, a mana battery, and a simple list of equations to fire from either emitter set. Internally they were a lot more complicated, having multiple levels of redundancy on pretty much everything. Twelve mana batteries so that damaging any eleven would still allow some functionality, three emitter arrays at either end, generic and dedicated sensor systems. The safeties could also be disabled, meaning that they'd continue to attack until destroyed, their batteries ran dry, or they were manually called off. But switching from 'training stun' to 'lethal' on the spell front required loading new equations in entirely.
Unlike Hive, or even Hal, none of the new stuff had a 'self repair' option. If it was damaged then Hive needed to repair it for now, but Taylor was hoping to at least be able to diagnose things by the time she was forty. If she was lucky and had been able to set aside going out and doing things herself. Maybe.
There was a very good chance that diagnosis and repair would always fall to Hive.
Tuesday morning Taylor was informed that the previous day's problems had been caused by an unauthorized monitoring device that'd been improperly installed in one of the light fixtures. They'd done a sweep of the entire floor and removed several others. They'd even given her the outer casing of one of them, on the basis that if someone was trying to spy on her then she might need to be on the lookout for them.
Hive spent most of the morning examining the thing and seemed very happy with some of the results. Apparently the 'outer casing' contained microcircuitry or something like that that hadn't necessarily been noticed when they'd gutted the interior.
Taylor had originally planned on bringing lunch with her, but Hive had asked her to pick up a cheap phone. She thought she knew what needed to be done to interface with the phone line, but figured that it was easy enough to obtain a simple phone and be positive since temporarily storing and dismantling their current phone had been rejected. Taylor didn't mind the minor expense, but ran into the problem of 'cheap phone' and 'the Boardwalk' not meshing well. She ended up getting a basic cordless phone instead, figuring that knowing how the more complicated circuitry worked wouldn't be a horrible thing. That was slipped into her bag, and she stopped in a nearby restroom before getting her lunch so that Hive could store it without anyone being likely to notice.
That done, Taylor ate her lunch and returned for her afternoon lessons while Hive tore apart the phone and ensured that she could build something to interface properly with the phone line.
Sadly, after reaching home that afternoon Taylor came to the conclusion that she probably didn't have time to train with Hive. She'd been delayed in leaving tutoring, then detoured a bit to avoid an altercation between various groups of thugs. She thought it was the Merchants and the ABB, but wasn't positive. The Empire might've been involved as well for all she knew, since she tried to skirt the edge of the whole thing.
Even without time to head off before her father would likely be home, she was hoping that she could get the 'answer the phone from anywhere' solution installed.
"So what do you have?" Taylor asked as she poured a glass of juice for herself.
A moment later the cordless phone box appeared, seemingly unopened, on the counter next to her. Blinking, Taylor put the juice away before picking up the box. She opened it up and found that it appeared to contain the cordless phone as described on the outside of the box and nothing more. She couldn't find anything out of place.
Giving up on figuring it out, she sighed. "So where's the new device?"
"That is the new device, my Lord," Hive responded. "On the outside it looks normal, but I replaced most of the internals. It's much less likely that someone will disconnect this from the line than anything else I could make to attach elsewhere."
"Oh. So you can redirect this to me whenever needed?"
"Yes. Or you can simply bring the handset with you."
Blinking, Taylor looked down at the phone. "You made a cross-dimensional cordless phone that doesn't feel like it relies on mana?"
"I considered using Shard-style functionality to accomplish that, but opted for the simpler solution of replacing the base to handset communication so that it can use the existing relay device to ensure that it will work so long as the handset is close enough to a communication-capable device, such as myself or one of the watches."
"Oh." That made a lot more sense, and sounded like it was a lot simpler.
With a sigh, Taylor ensured that she had everything unpacked and started setting up the phone in the hallway. The battery went into the phone easily enough and had a full charge, though whether it had come that way or was an upgrade from Hive she couldn't say. There was an outlet on the wall there as well, giving her a place to plug the base station in. She gave it a quick test when she'd hooked the phone line up and got a dial tone, so she figured it was all installed correctly enough.
Hive then spent twenty minutes walking her through how she could use her watch as though it were the handset, communicating through to the base station itself as though it were a second handset tied to it. Despite the original circuitry not supporting additional handsets at all, of course. The overall procedure was fairly straightforward, but there was an 'access code' needed to make it harder for anyone else to piggy-back on it. Whether or not anyone would ever try was debatable.
Taylor ended up starting on dinner after that, figuring that she might as well do so. After informing Hive that unless her father was going to throw out the old phone that they shouldn't dismantle it. Not that Hive thought that anything of significant use would come from doing so as much as she wanted 'direct confirmation' that it worked the way she thought it did internally. Eventually Taylor just grabbed the phone and headed upstairs so that Hive could cast a few scanning spells at it.
Later that evening Taylor ended up shaking her head, relieved that she'd gotten lucky. She'd not considered having any explanation for purchasing the phone at all, since she was expecting to be installing a new something along the phone lines and not replacing their phone. Instead she found herself at a loss when her father had noted the phone, only realizing at that moment that she didn't have a good excuse for having obtained it at all. Apparently she didn't have to worry about that, though, because he'd provided a suitable justification himself before she could say anything in the first place.
Really, it made a lot of sense that being able to bring the handset up to her room when possibly expecting him to call would be far easier than having to run downstairs to answer the phone. He'd even apologized for not having thought of it himself, before taking the now-spare phone upstairs and setting it up in his room. She hadn't known there was a jack in there, but it meant that she had less distance to travel if the phone rang while the cordless handset was downstairs.
"Might want to turn the oven down or shorten the cook time slightly on this next time," her father said as they ate. She'd burnt things. A little, mostly on the surface. "But otherwise it's not bad."
She nodded. "Thanks."
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, before he suddenly blinked and looked at her. "I almost forgot. Do me a favor and watch yourself on your trips home for the rest of the week. The city's having the Dockworkers remove several traffic lights on your likely route home. Cheaper than having the company putting new ones in do so, or so I was told. They'll be starting tomorrow. Supposedly most of the work should be done by the end of next week, just in time for your week off to be over, though I don't know how they got it set up as a rush job."
Taylor shrugged. "Maybe someone noticed that at least one of the walk lights was completely nonfunctional and it became a safety issue."
"I don't see why that would result in working over intersections across several blocks. Either that or this was longer in coming than I was led to believe and they only realized they needed things removed on short notice. It isn't like the Dockworkers are putting the new ones in. Just watch yourself if they're working when you pass through."
"I will."
After dinner Taylor and her father sat down in the living room to watch the news together. It turned out that one of the Merchant capes had attacked a Wards patrol and pissed off members of the Protectorate had gone to the rescue, and that had ballooned into a multiple gang altercation. Due to 'on the scene' details being scarce, though, the majority of the coverage was an angry Youth Guard representative. It took half an hour before they even found out that it'd been Aegis and Clockblocker on the patrol in question, and the two had returned effectively uninjured.
"I don't think the Wards are going to be happy about the Youth Guard cutting their patrols even more," Taylor finally said, causing her father to look at her. "Vista complained about some of that when she bought me lunch."
He nodded. "Yeah, I can see how that could be annoying for them. But it's all for their safety, right?"
She shrugged, honestly not knowing what was or wasn't for the best in this situation.
That night Taylor spent time browsing the Internet, still not having many good ideas for a cape name, while also using the simulation system to practice swinging around an energy blade in a safe environment. Hive was making a few more training drones and using some of the multitasking system with a set of sensor drones to try and figure out where mana-using civilizations may or may not be in relation to their current position. Something about using a number of spread out sensors to try and act like a much larger single system.
She wasn't having any luck, but wasn't willing to give up trying either. The sad thing was, she honestly didn't know if there was anything to find, having little to no clue about how long it'd been. Not knowing which direction to look didn't help either, and there were a lot of directions to check. Most of them not represented in normal three-dimensional space.
Focusing on weapon practice, Taylor had quickly come to the conclusion that without her own sensors helping her keep track of things that she'd be more of a risk to herself than to anyone she was fighting. It was far too easy to swing the blade in a way that would intersect her own body, something which would be unpleasant at best in the real world. In real combat it would be horrible. She probably needed to avoid trying to seriously fight with the thing until she had a lot more practice.
How to get that practice without anyone else available was an entirely different problem, because it wasn't like she could find a random swordsman or something and just practice with them. Not when her 'blade' was pretty much not solid to anything that anyone else she was aware of would be using. Sadly, in two of the three modes it was also pretty much guaranteed to be lethal to others. Perhaps leaving the thing as a 'cutting multitool' instead of an 'energy blade' was the right choice, only pulling it out when she needed cutting power more than for combat?
You know, aside from the fact that a previously-unknown inner sci-fi geek was screaming at her that it was too cool not to have available for fighting. Even if only to show up all the tinkers who'd failed to build a reliable one over the years, proving that...er...well, that her device was better than theirs, she guessed. Now that she thought about it and all, it wasn't like she'd built the things.
Sighing to herself in the simulation, she dismissed the simulated cutting tool and shut down the simulator to focus more on the portions of her researching for name ideas as well as those who might've used similar names and all. She'd already decided that the latin 'sex-' prefix was a no-go for blatantly obvious reasons. The greek 'hexa-' had seemed like a good choice at first, until she'd realized that a 'hex-' prefix would be mildly villainous in certain connotations. Worse, 'Hex' was a name used by an active villain. Which had removed a whole slew of possible names from her list.
Switching gears to more of a 'blade' or 'bladed weapon' theme to go with the six blade design she'd plastered all over the Knight Armor didn't take long before she ran into the problem of a lot of parahumans naming themselves after the specific weapon they'd chosen to use, and they didn't tend to ensure that they were the only one doing so. There were at least nine 'Halberd' parahumans that PHO knew about, not counting 'Halbeard' which both jokingly referred to Armsmaster and was apparently the name of a parahuman in Mexico. Four 'Polearms', twelve 'Spears', three 'Lances'. The list went on. Oddly, the only one on the list that nobody seemed to have claimed was 'maul'. She'd have thought a villain would've grabbed it for the other meaning.
Going with a name that started or ended in 'blade' itself had seemed like it could work, until she'd started running into news reports when checking on her initial ideas. It seemed like including the words 'blade', 'edge', or 'slash' in your name was a wonderful way to get personally targeted by Jack Slash. If you survived then you had his approval to keep the name, but it seemed like a very poor choice if you'd spotted the pattern. Especially as only two of the thirty or so thus targeted had survived.
It didn't take much searching to find that those who claimed to use 'magic', by name or otherwise, tended to be scoffed at. Even people like Myrddin who were generally respected weren't given a free pass there. Then there were various groups that liked to claim they were magic users and targeted those that fit their themes, one of which was in New York. Which was definitely close enough to make a trip to target her. Even if they hadn't targeted Rune, who seemed to play up a semi-magical angle here in the Bay. Though perhaps they didn't think they could work with a modern-day Nazi? Still, probably best to not tempt fate there, at least not with her choice of cape name.
Perhaps it was time to give up on the themed names entirely and go with something completely disconnected from what she was capable of? It wasn't like the Triumvirate had names that actually said anything about their powers, after all. Which meant picking something that she might be happy being called. And was 'suitably heroic', hopefully without falling into 'pretentious'. Probably while avoiding asian or germanic words, given the gangs in the immediate area. No need to accidentally associate herself with either of them, right?
She ended up finding a couple of sites that listed words and names that allowed her to filter things appropriately. Of course, it then turned out that either a number of capes had the same idea or her 'pick something not themed' idea was running against 'the names can still be themed for someone else'. The first eighty things she decided sounded like they were workable turned out to be used, and most of them were in use by villains. Granted, a number of them weren't in North America, and thus she probably could've gotten away with using them, but she was being picky on that front.
Eventually she found a set of names that didn't come up in relation to parahumans at all, though a couple of them surprised her on that front. She probably shouldn't complain. They were also 'plain' enough to explain why people hadn't been using them. And the more she thought about it, the more a simple name appealed to her. After all, by current legal definitions she wasn't actually a parahuman. She was verifiably a standard human biologically and didn't have a corona pollentia or gemma, after all.
Looking things over, she did some deeper checks and further narrowed things down. Removing any that were too common, for example, as well as anything definitively masculine. An entire group was removed due to coming up too often in porn, one way or another. She finally narrowed it down to 'Lilia' and 'Minerva'. The latter was theoretically pretentious, even if it had been used as a normal name, due to the whole goddess connection. The former instead linked to flowers. Flowers with six petals, though, so it had that going for it.
It didn't take much thought to decide that the whole link between flowers and sex meant that Lilia was probably a poor choice. As such, she figured that she'd go with Minerva, and even made a mental note to add a 'patch' on her Knight Armor with the name just to drive it, and its spelling, home. Might reduce the number of times she had to introduce herself too, for that matter.