Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
I'm gonna be honest; normally I'm fine with Wards stories, but I feel like this was a really bad move from an authorial standpoint, for this story, that is.
That's the case for several reasons.
1. Powers Testing
Wards have to go through powers testing. The idea that the PRT, and Piggot especially, wouldn't require this would simply put be completely immersion breaking. Admittedly, alone might not throw up any flags... yet, but as soon as her specialty undergoes some massive shift between architectural styles, she's gonna be doing more rounds of this, and the broad strokes of the nature of her power is going to quickly become apparent.
Simply put, Addy cannot conceal the nature of her ever-changing powerset. It's basically impossible for her to avoid. She might get away with it for a few weeks, but it'll become pretty clear pretty fast, and from there once you realize she's a Tinker-Trump, it doesn't take many brain cells to guess that maybe the little girl who was totally unfazed by killing a whole mess of Empire & Dragonslayer capes might just be the same Tinker who decided it was fine to attack a hospital and a school with biotinker monsters.
Worse, they found her old lab, and that could equate to an assumption that she didn't make more because she'd lost the facility and that's why she doesn't have any of that stuff at home. In addition, Armsmaster already has samples of her neural interface stuff. He may well be able to identify it from any X-Rays or MRIs they perform on her. (More about that later)
2. Tinkertech Certification
This is honestly the big one. Wasn't one of her biggest problems at the very start the recognition that by the time she ever got anything approved, her specialization was liable to up and change?
That's a pretty damning limitation, and there's no way the PRT is going to agree to let her build first then seek permission. Especially not with a wildly fluctuating specialty that could turn up who knows what. The whole point of the certification processes like that is to make sure that Protectorate Tinkers aren't making things that are going to spin wildly out of control or wreak incredible havoc if something breaks.
I mean really, it's ludicrous to think their approval process would include a loophole by which Tinker might create some kind of nanotech that then escapes before it can be properly studied, all because the Tinker built it ahead of time.
(I will, however, admit that this goes against canon. Piggot's dressing-down of Kid Win did fairly strongly suggest, even if it didn't outright say, that Built First, Review Second, Deploy Third was the norm. However, I find that kind of mindboggling given the vague (and justified) paranoia regarding cape abilities that's so prevalent among the PRT. I mean, imagine Leet as a Ward and how they'd have to treat his tech)
3. Tinker Fugues
Addy fugues constantly. Worse, she fugues in such a way that she typically manages to finish entire projects in one go. That's an incredible risk of disaster for her, because what if she does get something like say Starcraft or Warframe and ends up accidentally biotinkering up something because for whatever reason she was forced to hold off on that specialty at her lair lab?
4. PRT Duplicity
A corollary to both #1 and #3, the PRT might actually try and trip her up deliberately during powers testing, putting her in a room with XYZ biological materials or computer electronics to see what she can do, or to see if she'll go into a fugue and make something unintentionally.
5. Cauldron
Let's not forget that Alexandria is after her thanks to Dragon reporting Codi's existence & maker. Personally, I find it kind of immersion-breaking that Alexandria didn't already have some kind of 'proof' in place to force compliance, especially as it was her idea to bring federal law into things. She, of all people, would have known what would be required to actually use that, and for that matter I doubt Contessa would have a hard time planting evidence as needed. Hell, with the laptop out of Addy's hands, and the PRT knowing things were stolen from her house by the Dragonslayers, Contessa should have been able to retrieve it and anonymously turn it in or something. Maybe fake it having been 'retrieved' from the warehouse fight.
6. Medical Scans
Once again, Wards procedures. There's zero chance that the PRT doesn't give Wards regular medical checkups. At a bare
minimum, I'm sure the Youth Guard insists on the occasional physical for simple health reasons, and I can't imagine that Master/Stranger protocols (or powers testing for that mattet) don't involve getting things like baseline vitals, bloodwork, X-Rays, etc as part of measures to physically confirm someone's identity in the case of a security breach.
Not to mention health records are kinda a wee bit important for any profession that's gonna see combat, to make sure there aren't any serious medical complications that they need to know about beforehand, like that thing where all your internal organs are swapped around. And that stuff is probably even more critical to know about when you're talking about capes who have regenerative powers — they'll want to know how your body responds to injury & medication irrespective of the fact that you regenerate. After all, Trumps are a thing and Addy can't heal herself if she's unconscious.
7. Mental Health Issues
Addy is seriously unstable. There's pretty much no way that people in both the Wards and the PRT aren't going to notice, and I suspect that that would either lead to her quickly being forcefully remanded into psychiatric care, forced to speak to a therapist on a regular basis, or simply declared dangerously unstable/deranged and sent to the Birdcage on the grounds of her maybe being able to tinker up super-plagues or nanotech. Possibly even not so much a 'maybe', depending in some of the above points.
Of those scenarios, the only one that might work for her is #2, forced therapy, but even there it needs to be noted that therapists are required by law to notify authorities if they she's a serious danger to herself or others... which is liable to lead to the other two scenarios anyway.
8. The ADAM Problem.
Here, Addy mentioned it herself: If she doesn't get to her lab to deal with her dialysis regularly, she starts going through physical changes. What if she gets injured, or trapped in a fugue for too long, or simply puts it off for a day for some reason and then ends up injured or unconscious under PRT care for another day or two? What if M/S lockdown occurs, or she has to spend a couple of days under observation, and she hasn't done the dialysis that week?
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These are all just things that came to me off the top of my head, and that doesn't even include simpler things like her accidentally getting caught out as being Splice. There's just too many ways that the PRT ought to instantly figure out that something is seriously off with the girl, and should by all rights mean she basically has to go villain.
I'm not saying her going villain/vigilante is a bad thing. After all, she herself seems to expect it to happen eventually anyway. But it seems like a really poor writing decision to me to put her in this situation, because from here it looks like either she should get caught out basically immediately, in which case what was the point of having her agree, or else you'd have to stretch credulity far past the breaking point with respect to the PRT's level of competence.
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