Well then. That is going to be an interesting meeting in a few days. Because now it'd no longer be inactive. Although having Armsmaster's power all of a sudden doesn't really discount the 'Trump' power. I suppose one argument would be that it was a Trump/Stranger, that managed to hide the 'has an active power' bit. Power copying trump.
I wonder where that Cache will end up. Presumably in her home, given that it doesn't sound that big. Will be a pain to hide it. But at least it isn't going to be suddenly appearing in Armsmaster's lab.
Other possibilities of hilarious reaction is if Brianne manages to roll up something to make her immune to Panacea's attacks.
A sad thought is that she could have actually avoided the situation with a few facts/statements: She has no memory of anyone doing this to her, and she has reason to believe that the local PRT has been compromised. But well, that might not work if Amy actually knew her before the swap out. Would explain why she grabbed her wrist. Had to double check to make sure there wasn't a stranger impersonating her friend/acquaintance. Doesn't seem like Dean made a connection that they knew each other, though. So either Amy never really mentioned it, or it's that Amy and Brianne don't know each other that well before the change.
Well, if it's considered a trigger event, than problems just got bigger. Parahumans around going to feel it.
Also, there is interesting question. Her power hijacked a shard from the entity and make second connection to it, so not only Armsmaster could has this power? Or maybe was created new shard, similar to Armsmaster's one, or it's just simulation of power without shard existence? Have something to think about.
I wonder where that Cache will end up. Presumably in her home, given that it doesn't sound that big. Will be a pain to hide it. But at least it isn't going to be suddenly appearing in Armsmaster's lab.
Yeah, getting the precog protection so soon was incredibly lucky.
Also, uh, about the cache... I'll be entirely honest, I completely forgot it was a freebie for tinkers until right before I posted the chapter. And I had four chapters already written without access to the cache. Looks like Armsmaster will be freaked out by what's going to be appearing in the ship
Well then. That is going to be an interesting meeting in a few days. Because now it'd no longer be inactive. Although having Armsmaster's power all of a sudden doesn't really discount the 'Trump' power. I suppose one argument would be that it was a Trump/Stranger, that managed to hide the 'has an active power' bit. Power copying trump.
When Amy was talking about the 'A trump did this to you', she was talking about a Teacher-like trump targeting her for some reason. But, yes, when people start learning more about her powers, or when Armsmaster gets ahold of some of her tech...
A sad thought is that she could have actually avoided the situation with a few facts/statements: She has no memory of anyone doing this to her, and she has reason to believe that the local PRT has been compromised. But well, that might not work if Amy actually knew her before the swap out. Would explain why she grabbed her wrist. Had to double check to make sure there wasn't a stranger impersonating her friend/acquaintance. Doesn't seem like Dean made a connection that they knew each other, though. So either Amy never really mentioned it, or it's that Amy and Brianne don't know each other that well before the change.
In case you don't read the rest of my comment, I'll say here too that 'Panacea grabs her wrist' happened after she brushed by her, had accidental skin contact, and realised something was wrong. I might edit the chapter to make that more clear, since I didn't realise it wasn't obvious to other people like it was to me in my author-brain.
That aside, it's less that she doesn't think she can come up with good technical-truths to tell the PRT (putting aside the fact that Armsmaster's lie detector detects intentional deceit and not just 'are their words true or not', as far as I can tell) and more the fact that she doesn't trust herself to walk into the PRT, lie smoothy and convincingly without showing any panic, and walk out without being captured.
They're in a busy lunch-room, of course, and they'd probably be sitting separately, and it's not like all of them would've actually experienced it before. But, they're going to put the clues together, and if this Dean is Gallant, he'd talk about what he'd been doing at the time, and... Well
You better start saying that early morning isn't the time to be learning MATH! It would have been funnier for that stupid s to get her caught as different.
Also, uh, about the cache... I'll be entirely honest, I completely forgot it was a freebie for tinkers until right before I posted the chapter. And I had four chapters already written without access to the cache. Looks like Armsmaster will be freaked out by what's going to be appearing in the ship
Well that entirely depends on where on the ship it is. He might not find it for awhile. Too busy looking at other bits of the ship. Hilarious option: He finds it after Brianne gets a warehouse option. So he confirms what the cache is, that it looks based on his tech. And then, as he moves to inspect it further, the ship vanishes out from around him, and he falls however far down to the ground from where he is in the ship.
And from there, I'd guess the conclusion would be something like the bits of the ship he took to his lab ended up having some sort of tracking/scanning equipment and took a look at his lab/the equipment he used to examine it. Along with his tinkertech suit when he was on the ship, along with maybe his motorcycle. With the Cape who 'made' the spaceship analyzing it from data sent to them from the ship and making their own version of his tinkertech. And 'storing' it away. Possibly without realizing that it was stored on the ship, which was kind of blocked away. Possibly not even realizing that others were in there, depending on how the 'automatic' systems scanning it were there. Only then realizing that they needed to hit the recall button.
But hey, at least it won't be the case with some of those blackboxing perks where Armsmaster isn't able to understand his own tech because of similar principles being involved. Possibly not even stuff derived from that cache if it applied to it, since it would more or less be him getting a slightly different viewpoint, with stuff that was already in his toolbox.
There is a hilarious image of Brianne making an identical halberd to his, using the blackboxing perks, and he can't figure out how the identical replica works.
When Amy was talking about the 'A trump did this to you', she was talking about a Teacher-like trump targeting her for some reason. But, yes, when people start learning more about her powers, or when Armsmaster gets ahold of some of her tech...
Well yeah, I was thinking more that said Trump might have also given a 'hide that this person is an active parahuman' ability. 'Cause that's useful for infiltration and the like. Along with the horrific possibility of managing to convince someone that their actual power was gifted to them by said Master/Trump cape.
It's also somewhat easier to believe that that's the case, rather than 'Brianne triggered in the couple days between Panacea checking her'. Especially with knowing how powers are gained, which Brianne already stated. Which does imply that she went through something horrific, which background checks would reveal to be the case given the hints already given. Such as what Amy is thinking happened to her already.
Though with the Tinker powers being longer periods of stress for the Trigger Event... Amy might, if she's aware of that specific detail, believe that she's partially responsible for that final straw. On the plus side, it would probably be a power that helps prevent the (imagined) problem she was thinking was the case. Not as much if it was a Trump category power, admittedly. Though there's still time for that to 'appear'.
Well that would prevent the same thing from happening now, she kind of has to get Amy to use her power again, even if it's a bluff. If only to not be suspicious. This of course precludes a power roll that would negate it entirely. Possibly trolling potential after that if she calls Amy's bluff and just risks it, refuses to let Amy 'regress' it. Maybe even give allusions to leaving a deadman's switch to specify who did that infection to her. It's possible that, in that situation, they might think Amy had something to do with Too Many Mouths.
That aside, it's less that she doesn't think she can come up with good technical-truths to tell the PRT (putting aside the fact that Armsmaster's lie detector detects intentional deceit and not just 'are their words true or not', as far as I can tell) and more the fact that she doesn't trust herself to walk into the PRT, lie smoothy and convincingly without showing any panic, and walk out without being captured.
Well, Armsmaster's lie detector is canonically not perfect, even without Taylor's canon 'offload reactions into controlled bugs'. Though fanon has it more useful, since Tinkertech. But yeah, her concerns there would probably make it so that entirely too much would be detected.
I love to hate your Amy. Wow, Amy was such a bitch. I wouldn't call that blackmail, I would call that mutual assured destruction.
And then Amy says she gave infection to her. Either it's fear mongering or she actually did 'assault of parahuman power' on her.
I'd 100% give something back at her because I'm petty like that. Maybe do a few fictitious things done to her and her imagination would make the fear real. Or maybe do a right hook. Maybe not, it gives too much evidence.
If she does blab or give more trouble to her by giving out her parahuman ID then she might tell Amy & others she was partially responsible for her gaining powers. As Amy is a natural trigger she knows what that entail. Maybe her self righteousness will fade a bit. Heck she wouldn't need to use trigger or anything like that. She could just say she felt despair, hopelessness and then she gained powers. This gives us Amy as a perfect scapegoat. Let's see how much hero she feels now. *Evil laugh* Kekekeke.
Is tinker cache also protected by the 24h rule?
Best to read up on parahuman law such things to see how long PRT can detain others.
Please don't let her ID be outed for all this early. I'm afraid that Amy know -> Dean know -> Dean goes to PRT -> PRT -> Game over for interesting stuff fast. Outed ID makes so that the outed person is restricted how they go about their lives and how they interact with the world.
Well Skitter wouldn't exactly be the best thing for her unless she was already a ally at the time. At that point she might need to be careful to avoid intended to make a stake-sized bug but until then it would probably not be a problem.
Relatedly she might also want to make it as fresh as the insect rather then as fresh as the stake since insect blood, hemolymph, is apparently sweet.
Physical contact with so many people was making me grind all my teeth. At least I was taller than most people, though, instead of being one of the shortest people in any given class.
Thank god that her mouths are resistant to harm but by god that must be a horrible sound...A horrible sound which is probably percolating in her stomach...My first thought is that regurgitating that at people would probably be horrible enough to warrant a Blaster/Shaker Rating. My second thought was that you could probably combine that with a tuning fork and get something pretty horrible.
Oh cool. All sorts of interesting chemical reactions happen at those sort of temperatures. I think that you can turn silicate into silicon with that sort of heat.
That being said though you could probably do the same by combining it with something like oxygen and making it prefer to bond to itself or something and get silicon that way.
It was strange how willing she was to pull an unknown cape aside, though - she was a Striker with a pretty slow-working power, and she'd just found out my secret identity. If I'd been a villain, or even a paranoid hero…
A person couldn't tell this without a baseline to compare them to. Even with a body-scanning power it's just too hard to tell active and inactive Coronas apart.
I had powers. Powers that weren't from a shard. If I wasn't being interrogated by an angry biokinetic, I would've collapsed in relief.
Whatever had brought me here, it was outside the realm of the entities. I didn't have a genocidal alien in my head, and I wasn't limited by what shards were willing to give out.
It would explain the spaceship tinker power, as well as the Scout that had turned up in the city. If I didn't have a shard power, anything was fair game.
Not entirely sure why people hate the Shards so much. Like sure the Shard Cluster Entities are malign but Shards themselves run the scale somewhere between benevolent, to their Hosts at least, to aggressive toward eachother. Naturally they occasionally spill hazards over the environment or fuck up helping their Hosts and kill them but whenever they're functioning properly they're pretty symbiotic.
"If you out me to the PRT, I'd have to tell them everything I learned from my Thinker power," I said. The words tasted like ash and desperation.
"Like what?"
I took a deep breath.
"Like the fact your power works on brains."
She went still.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she lied.
"The only reason you don't do work on brains is because you're scared of messing something up, because they're so delicate." I paused. "That, and it'd be harder to resist certain temptations."
She punched me in the face.
I fell flat on my ass, blood dripping down my nose. My glasses weren't cracked, but the wire nose-bridge had bent slightly.
"Look," I said, "I really, really don't want to have to say this. You're pushing me into a corner here, and I'm lashing out."
"Bullshit," she growled. "If you really didn't want to do it, you wouldn't have done it."
"I gave you an infection," she said. "It's benign at the moment, but it'll get worse if you leave it alone for too long."
She- what?
"You're dangerous," she continued. "If I can't tell anyone else about you, that means I'll need to keep you in check myself. Meet up with me again in the next few days, and I'll wind the infection's progression back."
Oh mother fucker that's actually hilarious~ I love it~ Especially since this is recently enough after meeting Amy that she could reasonably blamed for causing the hypothetical Trigger that provided it~
As a side-benefit this should conveniently allow her to make her various devices small enough, or at least collapsible enough, to swallow and merge with other things via her Stomach.
Speaking of her Stomach she should be able to easily make one of the more difficult things to make, that being wire, via combining a given material with just some string. Or possibly some polymer fibrils made via electrospinning. That manufacturing technique would almost certainly be available to that Speciality. Also something like that gold pencil would probably be good for making some circuits. Nanoscale thin layers of gold are flexible enough that they were considered for flexible electronic components. Thermal spraying, or possibly just regular spraying if Not!Brianne could just combine some gold with some spray paint or a fine-mist paint-sprayer, would probably be a better way to make more complex circuits though since pencil markings can leave a decent amount of material behind.
It might just be easiest to write some circuit configuration just on paper and then merge it with a small integrated circuit to change its configuration into a circuit of your choosing though. Not even really worth making a larger circuit and then shrinking it if you can start with a micro-circuit and then remake it.
Also didn't Armsmaster make his own stimulants? That could make making better ADHD meds, or even just nootropics in general, a lot more possible.
I imagine that the course of events went something along the lines of her noticing that her class-mate was a very odd several thousand degrees and extended in directions that she thought didn't exist, wondered which Cape she was, checked her brain and noticed a startling lack of activity in the part of the brain associated with powers, and panicked.
Also the extradimensionality and weird biology probably set her Shard off something fierce.
Well then. That is going to be an interesting meeting in a few days. Because now it'd no longer be inactive. Although having Armsmaster's power all of a sudden doesn't really discount the 'Trump' power. I suppose one argument would be that it was a Trump/Stranger, that managed to hide the 'has an active power' bit. Power copying trump.
I wonder where that Cache will end up. Presumably in her home, given that it doesn't sound that big. Will be a pain to hide it. But at least it isn't going to be suddenly appearing in Armsmaster's lab.
Other possibilities of hilarious reaction is if Brianne manages to roll up something to make her immune to Panacea's attacks.
A sad thought is that she could have actually avoided the situation with a few facts/statements: She has no memory of anyone doing this to her, and she has reason to believe that the local PRT has been compromised. But well, that might not work if Amy actually knew her before the swap out. Would explain why she grabbed her wrist. Had to double check to make sure there wasn't a stranger impersonating her friend/acquaintance. Doesn't seem like Dean made a connection that they knew each other, though. So either Amy never really mentioned it, or it's that Amy and Brianne don't know each other that well before the change.
It'd be pretty fucking fantastic if it showed up with her ship. Especially since Armsmaster's presumably looking through it. Imagine you're a Tinker and you look though this random ship that shows up and the next thing to show up there is your fucking Workshop.
Also a Anti-Amy countermeasure would be pretty easy to come up with. Get some spray-on scratch-proof coating, combine it with some egg-shell, for breathability, and a bit of skin nibbled off of the tips of your fingers for appearances sake and spray it all up and down your arms. Maybe get some fake nails, possibly combined with actual nails for realism, if the spray covers up your natural ones.
Well, if it's considered a trigger event, than problems just got bigger. Parahumans around going to feel it.
Also, there is interesting question. Her power hijacked a shard from the entity and make second connection to it, so not only Armsmaster could has this power? Or maybe was created new shard, similar to Armsmaster's one, or it's just simulation of power without shard existence? Have something to think about.
Nah. If it's actually a Shard at all then it's in its own separate Shardspace or some Fiat-made equivalent. It could very well just be all of the same information and processing, and possibly dimensional fuckery, as a Shard but in a non-Shard Fiat-based medium.
The Perk does get into the Possibly!Shards ability to Bud off other Possibly!Shards though. That could be weird.
I'm sure that Armsmaster's met other Tinkers with similar miniaturization abilities before. Not on the same level as himself of course but enough that Brianne can probably cover up having the same Speciality as him by leaning into her mobile space habitat speciality.
More importantly Brianne had, as far as anyone can tell, a Trigger Event right after Amy dragged her away and and a fight with her.
Also, uh, about the cache... I'll be entirely honest, I completely forgot it was a freebie for tinkers until right before I posted the chapter. And I had four chapters already written without access to the cache. Looks like Armsmaster will be freaked out by what's going to be appearing in the ship
I reiterate: Imagine you're a Tinker, and you go to look into this suddenly appearing space ship with a bunch of awesome technology, and then your Workshop suddenly appears~ If they're assuming that someone made it happen intentionally then they're also going to assume that they're being flexed on.
When Amy was talking about the 'A trump did this to you', she was talking about a Teacher-like trump targeting her for some reason. But, yes, when people start learning more about her powers, or when Armsmaster gets ahold of some of her tech...
Yeah just transparent rather then skin-colored could also work. Just as long as it breaths well enough. Possibly a la Assassinorum Synskin rather then fabric so as to keep out environmental hazards a bit better. Maybe also with a bit of invisibility a la Thermoptic Camouflage for emergencies? If you're going to make it transparent rather then skin-colored then giving it those sort of refractive properties would be a decent idea.
Well that entirely depends on where on the ship it is. He might not find it for awhile. Too busy looking at other bits of the ship. Hilarious option: He finds it after Brianne gets a warehouse option. So he confirms what the cache is, that it looks based on his tech. And then, as he moves to inspect it further, the ship vanishes out from around him, and he falls however far down to the ground from where he is in the ship.
And from there, I'd guess the conclusion would be something like the bits of the ship he took to his lab ended up having some sort of tracking/scanning equipment and took a look at his lab/the equipment he used to examine it. Along with his tinkertech suit when he was on the ship, along with maybe his motorcycle. With the Cape who 'made' the spaceship analyzing it from data sent to them from the ship and making their own version of his tinkertech. And 'storing' it away. Possibly without realizing that it was stored on the ship, which was kind of blocked away. Possibly not even realizing that others were in there, depending on how the 'automatic' systems scanning it were there. Only then realizing that they needed to hit the recall button.
But hey, at least it won't be the case with some of those blackboxing perks where Armsmaster isn't able to understand his own tech because of similar principles being involved. Possibly not even stuff derived from that cache if it applied to it, since it would more or less be him getting a slightly different viewpoint, with stuff that was already in his toolbox.
There is a hilarious image of Brianne making an identical halberd to his, using the blackboxing perks, and he can't figure out how the identical replica works.
Oh hell that would actually be hilarious. What's even funnier is that Brianne has a Perk that makes things easier to maintain and require less of it. She could make Armsmasters tech and lock him out of it even as he understood how to maintain it better then his own tech.
Well that would prevent the same thing from happening now, she kind of has to get Amy to use her power again, even if it's a bluff. If only to not be suspicious. This of course precludes a power roll that would negate it entirely. Possibly trolling potential after that if she calls Amy's bluff and just risks it, refuses to let Amy 'regress' it. Maybe even give allusions to leaving a deadman's switch to specify who did that infection to her. It's possible that, in that situation, they might think Amy had something to do with Too Many Mouths.
She doesn't even need to bluff falling for Amys bluff but choosing to die from it to spite her. She could just claim to have cured it with her own powers.
Relatedly though Amy could have achieved a non-infectious illness that would be resistant to anything Brianne was pretty easily by giving her a auto-immune disorder.
Edit: you know what just occurred to me? Brianne is a Tinker with space-travel. You know what Tinker resources are in space? Spheres incomplete moon base. I just checked the Fandom Wiki and Alan actually sent up drones and started production on his moon-base, and would have sent himself up if that wouldn't have messed with his powers enough to ruin the point of going in the first place, so there's just a massive cache of worn-out old Tinkertech up there ready for just anyone to go and get it.
Amy brushed past her, and her power let her see Brianne's extra mouths, so she grabbed her wrist.
Yeah, getting the precog protection so soon was incredibly lucky.
Also, uh, about the cache... I'll be entirely honest, I completely forgot it was a freebie for tinkers until right before I posted the chapter. And I had four chapters already written without access to the cache. Looks like Armsmaster will be freaked out by what's going to be appearing in the ship
When Amy was talking about the 'A trump did this to you', she was talking about a Teacher-like trump targeting her for some reason. But, yes, when people start learning more about her powers, or when Armsmaster gets ahold of some of her tech...
I like the Armsmaster Perk. It gives lots of nice freebies. It was a rather lucky roll to get this early. Precog Protection is grand. Hate to say it, but that's actually likely better than the actual perk. Armsmaster's power is rather awesome. She wouldn't have any of the issues he does either.
I'm rather mixed about her tinker tech cache appearing in her ship. O.k. it makes sense. She doesn't have her warehouse yet. She doesn't have custody/access to her ship either though. It could have dropped that tinker tech cache anywhere else in the city or nearby her.
They might think that the ship and tinker tech cache is an artifact of a shaker/projection effect. When it disappears into the warehouse, it'll really seem that way.
So have they had luck scanning through the hull and at the ship in general? I could see them understanding a lot of things and then suddenly a new work area appears. It seems based on the person who had been studying it the most as well.
I had to skim through the endless space jump doc. Doesn't really say anything about Dust except that it's the currency. I was wondering if Dust was required to build the spaceship or if it might have traces of Dust in it. Armsmasters's powers would love the idea of Dust. Can't really get any smaller than Dust.
I have to ask. What species ship is it? I've been assuming human, but there are other options. It just says that it is a space scout/RV, doesn't really say which faction type that you get.
I somewhat hope that she rolls the starbound perk that gives her another spaceship freebie. That one is a fixer-upper though.
I don't know. If I ended up with two spaceships, I'd take it as a sign that my powers don't want me on the planet and want me to leave ASAP.
You better start saying that early morning isn't the time to be learning MATH! It would have been funnier for that stupid s to get her caught as different.
Unfortunately for Brianne, she speaks British English. If someone compares her new homework to her old homework, she's going to be in hot water. Heck, even her handwriting could be a red flag.
Well that entirely depends on where on the ship it is. He might not find it for awhile. Too busy looking at other bits of the ship. Hilarious option: He finds it after Brianne gets a warehouse option. So he confirms what the cache is, that it looks based on his tech. And then, as he moves to inspect it further, the ship vanishes out from around him, and he falls however far down to the ground from where he is in the ship.
And from there, I'd guess the conclusion would be something like the bits of the ship he took to his lab ended up having some sort of tracking/scanning equipment and took a look at his lab/the equipment he used to examine it. Along with his tinkertech suit when he was on the ship, along with maybe his motorcycle. With the Cape who 'made' the spaceship analyzing it from data sent to them from the ship and making their own version of his tinkertech. And 'storing' it away. Possibly without realizing that it was stored on the ship, which was kind of blocked away. Possibly not even realizing that others were in there, depending on how the 'automatic' systems scanning it were there. Only then realizing that they needed to hit the recall button.
Yeah, tech scanning would probably be the most likely conclusion for him to come to. That, some sort of tinkertech materialisation power, or a trump power (which is technically the truth).
But hey, at least it won't be the case with some of those blackboxing perks where Armsmaster isn't able to understand his own tech because of similar principles being involved. Possibly not even stuff derived from that cache if it applied to it, since it would more or less be him getting a slightly different viewpoint, with stuff that was already in his toolbox.
There is a hilarious image of Brianne making an identical halberd to his, using the blackboxing perks, and he can't figure out how the identical replica works.
Oh hell that would actually be hilarious. What's even funnier is that Brianne has a Perk that makes things easier to maintain and require less of it. She could make Armsmasters tech and lock him out of it even as he understood how to maintain it better then his own tech.
Pfft. It feels a bit too malicious for Brianne to do on purpose, but that sure would be one way to piss him the fuck off, if she ever wanted to do that for whatever reason.
Well yeah, I was thinking more that said Trump might have also given a 'hide that this person is an active parahuman' ability. 'Cause that's useful for infiltration and the like. Along with the horrific possibility of managing to convince someone that their actual power was gifted to them by said Master/Trump cape.
It's also somewhat easier to believe that that's the case, rather than 'Brianne triggered in the couple days between Panacea checking her'. Especially with knowing how powers are gained, which Brianne already stated. Which does imply that she went through something horrific, which background checks would reveal to be the case given the hints already given. Such as what Amy is thinking happened to her already.
Though with the Tinker powers being longer periods of stress for the Trigger Event... Amy might, if she's aware of that specific detail, believe that she's partially responsible for that final straw. On the plus side, it would probably be a power that helps prevent the (imagined) problem she was thinking was the case. Not as much if it was a Trump category power, admittedly. Though there's still time for that to 'appear'.
There'd be a few possibilities here.
- Brianne has a trump/stranger friend who did that to her for whatever reason
- Brianne is a stranger, and her own powers were hiding her corona pollentia
- She triggered between the different times Panacea saw her (due to Panacea's actions and Gallant not looking into her more)
- She triggered between the different times Panacea saw her (due to the hypothetical bio-cape messing with her)
Well that would prevent the same thing from happening now, she kind of has to get Amy to use her power again, even if it's a bluff. If only to not be suspicious. This of course precludes a power roll that would negate it entirely. Possibly trolling potential after that if she calls Amy's bluff and just risks it, refuses to let Amy 'regress' it. Maybe even give allusions to leaving a deadman's switch to specify who did that infection to her. It's possible that, in that situation, they might think Amy had something to do with Too Many Mouths.
Again, Brianne is too soft to do something like that to someone. In this case, she'd also rather not have any part in driving the dangerous bio-cape off the edge, too.
Well, Armsmaster's lie detector is canonically not perfect, even without Taylor's canon 'offload reactions into controlled bugs'. Though fanon has it more useful, since Tinkertech. But yeah, her concerns there would probably make it so that entirely too much would be detected.
The fact that it works on intentional deceit is a major flaw, because if someone's lying to themself (like Skitter before she went all in on being an Undersider), it picks it up as true.
There'd be other ways it isn't perfect, too, but it'd be good enough that Brianne isn't willing to risk it.
I love to hate your Amy. Wow, Amy was such a bitch. I wouldn't call that blackmail, I would call that mutual assured destruction.
And then Amy says she gave infection to her. Either it's fear mongering or she actually did 'assault of parahuman power' on her.
I'd 100% give something back at her because I'm petty like that. Maybe do a few fictitious things done to her and her imagination would make the fear real. Or maybe do a right hook. Maybe not, it gives too much evidence.
If she does blab or give more trouble to her by giving out her parahuman ID then she might tell Amy & others she was partially responsible for her gaining powers. As Amy is a natural trigger she knows what that entail. Maybe her self righteousness will fade a bit. Heck she wouldn't need to use trigger or anything like that. She could just say she felt despair, hopelessness and then she gained powers. This gives us Amy as a perfect scapegoat. Let's see how much hero she feels now. *Evil laugh* Kekekeke.
Brianne, unfortunately, is too much of a doormat to retaliate. This is, in a way, one of the places where her metaknowledge is holding her back - she knows too much about Amy not to sympathise with her.
And yeah, mutually assured destruction. If Amy goes to the PRT, Brianne brings up the infection thing in front of the empath and the lie detector. If Bri goes to someone about what Amy did, she'd probably get even more desperate ("She's literally trying to ruin my life!") and would blab to the PRT about everything she found out.
Amy was just escalating, more or less. Brianne basically threatened to ruin her life, so Panacea desperately tried to get a semblance of control over the situation and did something stupid. Bri and Amy are both stupid idiots who do stupid idiot things on impulse because someone is threatening them.
Well, that would certainly be the logical thing to do. Is Bri going to do it, though? Probably not. She's got a bit of tunnel vision going, and she's just not a paragon of logic by any means.
Please don't let her ID be outed for all this early. I'm afraid that Amy know -> Dean know -> Dean goes to PRT -> PRT -> Game over for interesting stuff fast. Outed ID makes so that the outed person is restricted how they go about their lives and how they interact with the world.
Don't worry, her ID will stay... mostly un-outed, for now. The PRT in general don't try to go after civ identities unless there's a crisis. The furthest it would go right now would probably be something like "we think someone at Arcadia triggered, we have a suspicion on who it is, advice?"
Well Skitter wouldn't exactly be the best thing for her unless she was already a ally at the time. At that point she might need to be careful to avoid intended to make a stake-sized bug but until then it would probably not be a problem.
Relatedly she might also want to make it as fresh as the insect rather then as fresh as the stake since insect blood, hemolymph, is apparently sweet.
Thank god that her mouths are resistant to harm but by god that must be a horrible sound...A horrible sound which is probably percolating in her stomach...My first thought is that regurgitating that at people would probably be horrible enough to warrant a Blaster/Shaker Rating. My second thought was that you could probably combine that with a tuning fork and get something pretty horrible.
Honestly? She could also just Scream with all her mouths in an enclosed space, eat the echoes, and repeat until she has a Gigascream to drop into a tuning fork.
Oh cool. All sorts of interesting chemical reactions happen at those sort of temperatures. I think that you can turn silicate into silicon with that sort of heat.
That being said though you could probably do the same by combining it with something like oxygen and making it prefer to bond to itself or something and get silicon that way.
Also a Anti-Amy countermeasure would be pretty easy to come up with. Get some spray-on scratch-proof coating, combine it with some egg-shell, for breathability, and a bit of skin nibbled off of the tips of your fingers for appearances sake and spray it all up and down your arms. Maybe get some fake nails, possibly combined with actual nails for realism, if the spray covers up your natural ones.
Yeah just transparent rather then skin-colored could also work. Just as long as it breaths well enough. Possibly a la Assassinorum Synskin rather then fabric so as to keep out environmental hazards a bit better. Maybe also with a bit of invisibility a la Thermoptic Camouflage for emergencies? If you're going to make it transparent rather then skin-colored then giving it those sort of refractive properties would be a decent idea.
Speaking of her Stomach she should be able to easily make one of the more difficult things to make, that being wire, via combining a given material with just some string. Or possibly some polymer fibrils made via electrospinning. That manufacturing technique would almost certainly be available to that Speciality. Also something like that gold pencil would probably be good for making some circuits. Nanoscale thin layers of gold are flexible enough that they were considered for flexible electronic components. Thermal spraying, or possibly just regular spraying if Not!Brianne could just combine some gold with some spray paint or a fine-mist paint-sprayer, would probably be a better way to make more complex circuits though since pencil markings can leave a decent amount of material behind.
As a side-benefit this should conveniently allow her to make her various devices small enough, or at least collapsible enough, to swallow and merge with other things via her Stomach.
It might just be easiest to write some circuit configuration just on paper and then merge it with a small integrated circuit to change its configuration into a circuit of your choosing though. Not even really worth making a larger circuit and then shrinking it if you can start with a micro-circuit and then remake it.
A person couldn't tell this without a baseline to compare them to. Even with a body-scanning power it's just too hard to tell active and inactive Coronas apart.
Sure, but if Amy sees Brianne grinding her extra teeth without any brain activity from her smaller corona pollentia, she'd notice. Also, while Bonesaw had studied capes a whole lot more extensively, she was able to find where the gemma sections of activated pollentias are. Even if there's a lot of difference between individual coronas, I felt like Amy would be able to tell the difference.
I absolutely could be wrong on this. If you have any canon quotes, I'd be happy to read them and... probably not change anything, because it'd change too much in my pre-written story, and I'd have to delay for a while to rewrite everything.
Not entirely sure why people hate the Shards so much. Like sure the Shard Cluster Entities are malign but Shards themselves run the scale somewhere between benevolent, to their Hosts at least, to aggressive toward eachother. Naturally they occasionally spill hazards over the environment or fuck up helping their Hosts and kill them but whenever they're functioning properly they're pretty symbiotic.
That the guardian gave her powers because she's not Brianne, or that the guardian gave Brianne powers to fuck her over? Her assumption was that the guardian wouldn't give her powers because you'd only give powers to someone you actually liked.
As for whether the guardian did give her powers, I will neither confirm nor deny it
Oh mother fucker that's actually hilarious~ I love it~ Especially since this is recently enough after meeting Amy that she could reasonably blamed for causing the hypothetical Trigger that provided it~
I believe 'Armsmaster overuses stimulants' is fanon. I know he can make sedatives, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if he used stimulants for major crises. Don't believe there's any explicit evidence for it, though.
I imagine that the course of events went something along the lines of her noticing that her class-mate was a very odd several thousand degrees and extended in directions that she thought didn't exist, wondered which Cape she was, checked her brain and noticed a startling lack of activity in the part of the brain associated with powers, and panicked.
Also the extradimensionality and weird biology probably set her Shard off something fierce.
It'd be pretty fucking fantastic if it showed up with her ship. Especially since Armsmaster's presumably looking through it. Imagine you're a Tinker and you look though this random ship that shows up and the next thing to show up there is your fucking Workshop.
Nah. If it's actually a Shard at all then it's in its own separate Shardspace or some Fiat-made equivalent. It could very well just be all of the same information and processing, and possibly dimensional fuckery, as a Shard but in a non-Shard Fiat-based medium.
The Perk does get into the Possibly!Shards ability to Bud off other Possibly!Shards though. That could be weird.
I'm sure that Armsmaster's met other Tinkers with similar miniaturization abilities before. Not on the same level as himself of course but enough that Brianne can probably cover up having the same Speciality as him by leaning into her mobile space habitat speciality.
More importantly Brianne had, as far as anyone can tell, a Trigger Event right after Amy dragged her away and and a fight with her.
I reiterate: Imagine you're a Tinker, and you go to look into this suddenly appearing space ship with a bunch of awesome technology, and then your Workshop suddenly appears~ If they're assuming that someone made it happen intentionally then they're also going to assume that they're being flexed on.
She doesn't even need to bluff falling for Amys bluff but choosing to die from it to spite her. She could just claim to have cured it with her own powers.
The thing about calling Amy's bluff is that it could provoke her to do something riskier. Brianne's plan is to deliberately not call her bluff, let her think she still has something over her so she doesn't panic.
Relatedly though Amy could have achieved a non-infectious illness that would be resistant to anything Brianne was pretty easily by giving her a auto-immune disorder.
Edit: you know what just occurred to me? Brianne is a Tinker with space-travel. You know what Tinker resources are in space? Spheres incomplete moon base. I just checked the Fandom Wiki and Alan actually sent up drones and started production on his moon-base, and would have sent himself up if that wouldn't have messed with his powers enough to ruin the point of going in the first place, so there's just a massive cache of worn-out old Tinkertech up there ready for just anyone to go and get it.
I like the Armsmaster Perk. It gives lots of nice freebies. It was a rather lucky roll to get this early. Precog Protection is grand. Hate to say it, but that's actually likely better than the actual perk. Armsmaster's power is rather awesome. She wouldn't have any of the issues he does either.
Same here. It was an incredible roll, since not only does it give the bonuses to efficiency/miniaturisation, it'd also be built for a situation where the user doesn't necessarily have access to a high-tech R&D lab, assistants, funding, and years of time.
I'm rather mixed about her tinker tech cache appearing in her ship. O.k. it makes sense. She doesn't have her warehouse yet. She doesn't have custody/access to her ship either though. It could have dropped that tinker tech cache anywhere else in the city or nearby her.
Tbf, if the CF wasn't smart enough to drop the ship in a place the PRT wouldn't find it...
That is a valid thing to feel, though. She got something cool, and she's going to be locked out of it until she gets her warehouse or sneaks onto the ship somehow.
They might think that the ship and tinker tech cache is an artifact of a shaker/projection effect. When it disappears into the warehouse, it'll really seem that way.
So have they had luck scanning through the hull and at the ship in general? I could see them understanding a lot of things and then suddenly a new work area appears. It seems based on the person who had been studying it the most as well.
They would've had some luck, but the majority of the ship would still be a mystery.
To be honest, I haven't actually fleshed out the bulk of the details regarding that. That'll be in the next chapter I'll be drafting, which will be the tenth chapter, so it's not going to see the light of day for a while.
I had to skim through the endless space jump doc. Doesn't really say anything about Dust except that it's the currency. I was wondering if Dust was required to build the spaceship or if it might have traces of Dust in it. Armsmasters's powers would love the idea of Dust. Can't really get any smaller than Dust.
I have to ask. What species ship is it? I've been assuming human, but there are other options. It just says that it is a space scout/RV, doesn't really say which faction type that you get.
Really it would only need Armsmaster to only notice the cache just before the recall hit, thereabouts. The roll getting the warehouse is a bit less time constrained.
I like the Armsmaster Perk. It gives lots of nice freebies. It was a rather lucky roll to get this early. Precog Protection is grand. Hate to say it, but that's actually likely better than the actual perk. Armsmaster's power is rather awesome. She wouldn't have any of the issues he does either.
I'm rather mixed about her tinker tech cache appearing in her ship. O.k. it makes sense. She doesn't have her warehouse yet. She doesn't have custody/access to her ship either though. It could have dropped that tinker tech cache anywhere else in the city or nearby her.
They might think that the ship and tinker tech cache is an artifact of a shaker/projection effect. When it disappears into the warehouse, it'll really seem that way.
So have they had luck scanning through the hull and at the ship in general? I could see them understanding a lot of things and then suddenly a new work area appears. It seems based on the person who had been studying it the most as well.
I had to skim through the endless space jump doc. Doesn't really say anything about Dust except that it's the currency. I was wondering if Dust was required to build the spaceship or if it might have traces of Dust in it. Armsmasters's powers would love the idea of Dust. Can't really get any smaller than Dust.
I have to ask. What species ship is it? I've been assuming human, but there are other options. It just says that it is a space scout/RV, doesn't really say which faction type that you get.
I somewhat hope that she rolls the starbound perk that gives her another spaceship freebie. That one is a fixer-upper though.
I don't know. If I ended up with two spaceships, I'd take it as a sign that my powers don't want me on the planet and want me to leave ASAP.
Brianne could probably just rush the ship and fly off with it before anyone could stop her, I'm personally hoping that Armsmaster uses some spare parts from the Cache for his equipment for the sole purpose of having it vanish on him at a later point and leaving holes in his shit, and Dust seems to be some Picotechnology or Femtotechnology based off of some universal energy field.
Yeah, tech scanning would probably be the most likely conclusion for him to come to. That, some sort of tinkertech materialisation power, or a trump power (which is technically the truth).
There'd be a few possibilities here.
- Brianne has a trump/stranger friend who did that to her for whatever reason
- Brianne is a stranger, and her own powers were hiding her corona pollentia
- She triggered between the different times Panacea saw her (due to Panacea's actions and Gallant not looking into her more)
- She triggered between the different times Panacea saw her (due to the hypothetical bio-cape messing with her)
There's also the possibility that she experienced a faux-Trigger due to the hypothetical bio-cape and only looks like she Triggered while also artificially having powers from a separate source entirely.
Brianne, unfortunately, is too much of a doormat to retaliate. This is, in a way, one of the places where her metaknowledge is holding her back - she knows too much about Amy not to sympathise with her.
And yeah, mutually assured destruction. If Amy goes to the PRT, Brianne brings up the infection thing in front of the empath and the lie detector. If Bri goes to someone about what Amy did, she'd probably get even more desperate ("She's literally trying to ruin my life!") and would blab to the PRT about everything she found out.
Amy was just escalating, more or less. Brianne basically threatened to ruin her life, so Panacea desperately tried to get a semblance of control over the situation and did something stupid. Bri and Amy are both stupid idiots who do stupid idiot things on impulse because someone is threatening them.
Goes for about fifty to a hundred bucks, with some going above and bellow that, on Ebay though there's not really much use for it since we can refine regular metal into a better state.
Honestly I'd recommend going on a wiki-walk through common uses of everything on the elemental table. You could even have Brianne do it in setting as well. It's actually really interesting.
Honestly? She could also just Scream with all her mouths in an enclosed space, eat the echoes, and repeat until she has a Gigascream to drop into a tuning fork.
Sound management is probably pretty important for a spaceship. Like noise cancellation would be one thing but too much of that would drive 'most any living thing mad so some architectural harmonics would be important as well. A reverberation chamber could easily help with feelings of isolation.
Also I feel like a ultra-compounded scream, a tuning fork, and a knife would give you a pretty brutal vibroblade. Like just listen the harmonics of this blade alone.
Material science and biology is a bit of a passion of mine. When I see something like that Mouths Perk it sticks in my mind and tugs on all sort of trivia and foundational knowledge that I've carefully tucked away in the corners of my mind over the years.
Peoples ethical constraints are arbitrary enough that it's easiest to start with a possible course of action that has none and then adjust it for whatever morals come up.
It's also a good way to formulate plans in general I find. Start with the most bastardous direct horrible plan you can and then make it actually good.
A hilarious side-effect of this is that you end up with ideas like combining puppies or kittens with diamonds since they'd be easier to swallow then fully grown cats or dogs. With the advent of miniaturization technology it might be possible to get a small Iron Womb and get a horse fetus combined with diamond before it gets too large to swallow, assuming that one couldn't be shrunken like a Pokemon or something, and straight up end up with Butt Stallion.
Sure, but if Amy sees Brianne grinding her extra teeth without any brain activity from her smaller corona pollentia, she'd notice. Also, while Bonesaw had studied capes a whole lot more extensively, she was able to find where the gemma sections of activated pollentias are. Even if there's a lot of difference between individual coronas, I felt like Amy would be able to tell the difference.
I absolutely could be wrong on this. If you have any canon quotes, I'd be happy to read them and... probably not change anything, because it'd change too much in my pre-written story, and I'd have to delay for a while to rewrite everything.
Well snipping the specific quote from the sources at the bottom would be a bit finicky but I can provide the link to the Fandom Wiki page on them. It's a little bit of extra work but there's talk about how a small active Pollentia and a large inactive one are hard to distinguish.
Rachel had a broad connection to her Shard but that could have been worked with to prevent it from overshadowing her ability to engage with others. The thing to note about that is that she was homeless and had her power-granted mentality reinforced from a young age.
Burnscar would have been perfectly capable of adapting to a dulled emotional response, as shown by other psychopaths that manage to be perfectly acceptable members of society, but instead managed to keep getting locked into cycles and obsessions.
Labyrinth and the Tinker 15 seemed pretty clearly to be maladapted powers though. Can't be taken as indicators of the Shards intentions since those results were seemingly against their intentions.
I'm pretty sure that that ironic punishment angle is simply because Shards try to be efficient and inspired. Twisting a problem into its own solution.
A sense of irony would take a level of humanity that Shards, and probably most species that they used as Hosts, just wouldn't have. It's only because humans have a dark sense of humor that we think that we're being made a joke of.
That the guardian gave her powers because she's not Brianne, or that the guardian gave Brianne powers to fuck her over? Her assumption was that the guardian wouldn't give her powers because you'd only give powers to someone you actually liked.
As for whether the guardian did give her powers, I will neither confirm nor deny it
I believe 'Armsmaster overuses stimulants' is fanon. I know he can make sedatives, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if he used stimulants for major crises. Don't believe there's any explicit evidence for it, though.
I'd personally bet that that sedative would be one of those effective-in-ridiculously-small-amounts drugs that was then regulated by some smart-molecule nanostructure stuff that released it based on how fast Lungs body was healing. Possibly even one of those venoms or poisons that you could wipe out the populations of some nations of with a tea-spoon of.
Anyway yeah after looking through the Wiki I can't actually find a reference to him making any stimulants. You could probably make that same sort of drug regulation smart-molecules for things like nootropics and stimulants and other biochemical things though.
Getting into the actual mechanisms of it all? I guess that all of the other Perks that come from the Forge means that it'd probably start Budding pretty quickly.
Relatedly I think that Armsmasters actual Shard might not have as much of a reaction to its duplicate as one might think. There were equivalent Shards in each of the Entities after all.
Actually thinking about it some sort of more Trump-ish environmental mimicry power similar to Olivers would probably be plausible. She tries to lay low and her powers make her Corona look inactive. Have someone pick up on powers in spite of that and her powers make it look like she Triggered. Put her in front of a Tinker and she starts seeming like that Tinker. Something something aspects akin to Crawlers and Victors powers making them adapt to a social environment.
The thing about calling Amy's bluff is that it could provoke her to do something riskier. Brianne's plan is to deliberately not call her bluff, let her think she still has something over her so she doesn't panic.
Yeah but the thing about a biomanipulator and living lie detector forcing someone to regularly put themselves at their complete mercy is that it's way too weak of a position to try to put others into even if it wasn't done by a crazy bitch that'll confront Capes in their civilian identity out of fucking nowhere. Not a viable power dynamic even with blackmail.
My point was more that Amys threat isn't as improbable as it could be.
Also she could presumably modify her immune system by taking some immune cells out of a lymph node, or even just surgically removing one outright, and augmenting/modifying it with Tinkertech and/or property merging. Wouldn't even need to get them all if you could get the modified cells to colonize your whole system.
Same here. It was an incredible roll, since not only does it give the bonuses to efficiency/miniaturisation, it'd also be built for a situation where the user doesn't necessarily have access to a high-tech R&D lab, assistants, funding, and years of time.
Tbf, if the CF wasn't smart enough to drop the ship in a place the PRT wouldn't find it...
That is a valid thing to feel, though. She got something cool, and she's going to be locked out of it until she gets her warehouse or sneaks onto the ship somehow.
The smaller ships of Endless Space seem to have a crew/Manpower capacity of about a hundred to give some level of awareness to their size. Even if we assume some pretty packed living conditions that's still pretty large. I'm not sure what a miniaturized version of that would even look like.
Assuming that a regular ship is about the size of a apartment building, because even if sleeping conditions were basically capsules communal space would make up for the reduced size of individual rooms, and added some vertical farms and engines and life-support to that a miniaturized version would probably be a few times large then a house. Or possibly the size of a particularly large house.
It might be possible to make that under ground. If she just ate the soil and merged it into a particularly good bit of soil she could probably dispose of a lot of it so that's one problem gone. Maybe use drilling equipment that would be housed in and feed soil directly into her stomach without needing her to swallow since that'd probably get tedious and unpleasant after a while.
Getting to the basement and setting up some disguised doors might be a bit tricky since she's living in a apartment building. She'd have trouble renovating her own apartment much less other areas of the building. She might be able to set up some infrastructure by timing who is in and out of various rooms at given times, and she'd definitely want to put some bugs on them to make sure she had a heads up in case they were coming back unexpectedly, she could manage it with some sound cancellation equipment. She might be able to turn some chutes for things like trash and whatnot into a small elevator without tipping anyone off? Miniaturization ability would help hiding stuff in the walls at least.
It'd definitely be a hell of a project.
It'd at least be a good start to modify her phone and computer. Maybe also Aeons if they're up for that. Something a bit more powerful then a zappy tail and tongue and possibly take advantage of those display screens.
As long as you didn't mind the materials that equipment was made out of also having cellular division despite the lack of cells.
Actually thinking about it it'd probably be a decent idea to make plant or animal tissues grow into the shape of circuits, via some sort of emergent complexity, and then change what they're made of to make them functional.
So! I think I realised why most authors don't respond to every comment they get.
I've been trying to respond to everyone, show that I've been reading your comments and thinking about them. Except, the thing about that is that it's actually exhausting as hell. I hadn't got a single word written between when I posted the chapter and last night, because I was feeling burned out.
I'll still be reading every comment, of course, and I'll still be responding to some of them, but I'll be easing off the 'respond to everyone' thing.
Brianne could probably just rush the ship and fly off with it before anyone could stop her, I'm personally hoping that Armsmaster uses some spare parts from the Cache for his equipment for the sole purpose of having it vanish on him at a later point and leaving holes in his shit, and Dust seems to be some Picotechnology or Femtotechnology based off of some universal energy field.
I feel like Armsmaster would be smart enough not to integrate 'someone else's' tech into his own. It could be a projection, or made from power-generated materials (which decay over time according to WoG), or even just painstakingly made by someone else - he wouldn't want to break their shit apart and piss them off. Besides, he would've already seen the ship's 'self-repair function', so he'd probably want to test that on the gear before he tried anything with it.
Actually thinking about it some sort of more Trump-ish environmental mimicry power similar to Olivers would probably be plausible. She tries to lay low and her powers make her Corona look inactive. Have someone pick up on powers in spite of that and her powers make it look like she Triggered. Put her in front of a Tinker and she starts seeming like that Tinker. Something something aspects akin to Crawlers and Victors powers making them adapt to a social environment.
The smaller ships of Endless Space seem to have a crew/Manpower capacity of about a hundred to give some level of awareness to their size. Even if we assume some pretty packed living conditions that's still pretty large. I'm not sure what a miniaturized version of that would even look like.
Assuming that a regular ship is about the size of a apartment building, because even if sleeping conditions were basically capsules communal space would make up for the reduced size of individual rooms, and added some vertical farms and engines and life-support to that a miniaturized version would probably be a few times large then a house. Or possibly the size of a particularly large house.
It might be possible to make that under ground. If she just ate the soil and merged it into a particularly good bit of soil she could probably dispose of a lot of it so that's one problem gone. Maybe use drilling equipment that would be housed in and feed soil directly into her stomach without needing her to swallow since that'd probably get tedious and unpleasant after a while.
Getting to the basement and setting up some disguised doors might be a bit tricky since she's living in a apartment building. She'd have trouble renovating her own apartment much less other areas of the building. She might be able to set up some infrastructure by timing who is in and out of various rooms at given times, and she'd definitely want to put some bugs on them to make sure she had a heads up in case they were coming back unexpectedly, she could manage it with some sound cancellation equipment. She might be able to turn some chutes for things like trash and whatnot into a small elevator without tipping anyone off? Miniaturization ability would help hiding stuff in the walls at least.
It'd at least be a good start to modify her phone and computer. Maybe also Aeons if they're up for that. Something a bit more powerful then a zappy tail and tongue and possibly take advantage of those display screens.
So! I think I realised why most authors don't respond to every comment they get.
I've been trying to respond to everyone, show that I've been reading your comments and thinking about them. Except, the thing about that is that it's actually exhausting as hell. I hadn't got a single word written between when I posted the chapter and last night, because I was feeling burned out.
I'll still be reading every comment, of course, and I'll still be responding to some of them, but I'll be easing off the 'respond to everyone' thing.
I feel like Armsmaster would be smart enough not to integrate 'someone else's' tech into his own. It could be a projection, or made from power-generated materials (which decay over time according to WoG), or even just painstakingly made by someone else - he wouldn't want to break their shit apart and piss them off. Besides, he would've already seen the ship's 'self-repair function', so he'd probably want to test that on the gear before he tried anything with it.
Well yeah not his important tech but it is his own tech and it's just there so presumably less vital projects could benefit from it...KidWin would probably benefit from taking it apart for some temporary projects.
Oh I see. I should have just checked the Perk instead of the Wiki. Yeah you could probably miniaturize that into a suit or a mecha.
Maybe a mini-mecha a la Landmates? That seems like it would be the smallest thing that one could pilot rather then wear even if the "Cockpit" itself would be worn.
Though if you're going to pilot it anyway then there's no need for a humanoid mecha so you could presumably use something like Crying Wolfs mecha or a Tachikoma.
Well yeah not his important tech but it is his own tech and it's just there so presumably less vital projects could benefit from it...KidWin would probably benefit from taking it apart for some temporary projects.
It is still another tinker's tech, even if it was almost certainly generated from scans of him/his tech. He wouldn't want an unhappy tinker on his hands because he pulled apart their tech. Besides, who knows what sorts of traps they might've snuck into the gear?
Aeon is essentially a psychic/spiritual manifestation of Bri's soul, yeah.
Some stands have physical effects on their hosts, but other than damage to the stand transferring to the user, that's pretty much limited to Bound stands - stands that are part of the user's body. Love Deluxe, for instance, is Yukako's hair.
It is still another tinker's tech, even if it was almost certainly generated from scans of him/his tech. He wouldn't want an unhappy tinker on his hands because he pulled apart their tech. Besides, who knows what sorts of traps they might've snuck into the gear?
Yeah that's fair. That being said though I don't think that it would yet be reasonable to assume that the manifestation effect manifesting Tinkertech would necessarily mean that the source of the manifestation would be a Tinker. On a third cybernetic hand though I could also see any given trap propagating through the manifestation effect rather then the Tinkertech itself so, like, you're right about your suppositions but seemingly not for the reasons you were presenting.
Aeon is essentially a psychic/spiritual manifestation of Bri's soul, yeah.
Some stands have physical effects on their hosts, but other than damage to the stand transferring to the user, that's pretty much limited to Bound stands - stands that are part of the user's body. Love Deluxe, for instance, is Yukako's hair.
Accepting that I am wrong about the difficulty of modifying a Stand I am reminded that Tinkers are able to build devices based off of research into other Parahuman abilities. Particularly I am reminded that Armsmaster built a teleportation device into his Halberd by researching Miss Militias projection weapon and am now wondering what could be built based off of research into Stands.
I am also thinking that being able to propagate damage though that connection between a Stand and its User imply a ability to propagate other effects, such as healing or surgical repair, and that if Aeon is a manifestation of Briannes soul, being a part of her, then they should also manifest the Mouths from her Perk over themselves. Possibly only upon being given a body, which would presumably be possible at one point or another, if only to avoid the implications of Brianne having mouths covering her soul and/or retroactively making it so with or without edits.
Accepting that I am wrong about the difficulty of modifying a Stand I am reminded that Tinkers are able to build devices based off of research into other Parahuman abilities. Particularly I am reminded that Armsmaster built a teleportation device into his Halberd by researching Miss Militias projection weapon and am now wondering what could be built based off of research into Stands.
Another example would be the time he used a Clockblocking effect on a wave during a Leviathan fight, or the gun Kid Win made by studying Dauntless' 'hard electricity' gear.
I'm ruling stands as psychic enough to be picked up by psychic scanners. Armsmaster wouldn't have one without a reason (Tattletale in canon), so him and Bri would be able to get scans of it.
I am also thinking that being able to propagate damage though that connection between a Stand and its User imply a ability to propagate other effects, such as healing or surgical repair, and that if Aeon is a manifestation of Briannes soul, being a part of her, then they should also manifest the Mouths from her Perk over themselves. Possibly only upon being given a body, which would presumably be possible at one point or another, if only to avoid the implications of Brianne having mouths covering her soul and/or retroactively making it so with or without edits.
Aeon doesn't have the mouths in the same way it doesn't have opposable thumbs. Bri getting cybernetics or something would be... odd, since in Part 5, Chariot only had one whole limb, even though Polnareff had prosthetics.
This is something I'll have to sit down and think through when Bri gets the requisite perk/s.
I'm ruling stands as psychic enough to be picked up by psychic scanners. Armsmaster wouldn't have one without a reason (Tattletale in canon), so him and Bri would be able to get scans of it.
I'm not sure that there would be a psychic scanner in the entities playbook. Tattletale might claim she's as such publicly, but there really aren't any actual cases. The closest I think is more or less physical reading of the brains, which functions more or less the same, but is a bit different in how it works.
At the very least, I'd expect Stands to not be readable that way. The ones that aren't just plainly visible to other people, I mean. Offhand I suppose a device that would let you know someone was hallucinating something, and giving an image of said hallucination might work. In terms of 'compares reality, and what a scanned person is seeing/experiencing.
Armsmaster turned his head to look at where Miss Militia had Regent at gunpoint. "Which means you can stop trying to use your power on me, Regent. I've got a little blinking light in the corner of my H.U.D. telling me you're trying something. I've set up psychic and empathic shielding, to protect myself from you and Tattletale."
Another example would be the time he used a Clockblocking effect on a wave during a Leviathan fight, or the gun Kid Win made by studying Dauntless' 'hard electricity' gear.
I'm ruling stands as psychic enough to be picked up by psychic scanners. Armsmaster wouldn't have one without a reason (Tattletale in canon), so him and Bri would be able to get scans of it.
The fact that Armsmaster was able to produce psychic-resistant equipment despite a lack of psychics is pretty weird. I have to assume that "Psychic" effects are actually convergent applications of multiple different mechanisms.
Also you should know that the name "Stand" is apparently a pun or something in the original language and that the way that it was written made it also translate into "Ripple Ghost" so there might also be some Hamon shenanigans going on. They really claimed that Stands were based on a lot of things throughout the series.
Aeon doesn't have the mouths in the same way it doesn't have opposable thumbs. Bri getting cybernetics or something would be... odd, since in Part 5, Chariot only had one whole limb, even though Polnareff had prosthetics.
This is something I'll have to sit down and think through when Bri gets the requisite perk/s.
Well it's not as though that artificial anatomy would normally produce homologous Stand anatomy like organic anatomy apparently does.
Figuring out how to produce a Mouth on independent anatomy like a Stand would probably be pretty useful though. Especially if they attached to the same stomach as the rest of Briannes Mouths. I feel like it would almost certainly have spread to them if she got the Perk after getting Aeon.
I'm not sure that there would be a psychic scanner in the entities playbook. Tattletale might claim she's as such publicly, but there really aren't any actual cases. The closest I think is more or less physical reading of the brains, which functions more or less the same, but is a bit different in how it works.
At the very least, I'd expect Stands to not be readable that way. The ones that aren't just plainly visible to other people, I mean. Offhand I suppose a device that would let you know someone was hallucinating something, and giving an image of said hallucination might work. In terms of 'compares reality, and what a scanned person is seeing/experiencing.
I have to assume that that's a function of protecting against particles or energy fields that would effect the structure and/or configuration of nerves and emotional states in a way similar to Citrines power. Regent does have a Bud of Heartbreakers Shard after all and Armsmaster has Gallants power to research. The effect is probably similar enough for countermeasures against one to work against another.
A/N: This is an edited version of Chapter 6. Ch1-10 have been edited, anything beyond that is being rewritten.
Original Chapter 6 below:
The entity swam through the void, space warping around it to carry it through the stars.
Forget, it broadcast to its counterpart.
The minds of the host species had close enough parallels to the shards that they could draw information through their bonds upon insinuation. Keeping the information secret was paramount - should the hosts realise what was happening, it would put the cycle in jeopardy.
Agreement, the counterpart acknowledged.
Emotion, the entity continued.
High emotional levels were ideal for maximising conflict and growth. Its shards would connect to the individuals most prone to strong feelings, those mired in negativity, with no hope left for salvation. Adolescents were ideal, as they were at the most emotional state of the host species, in addition to being at the cusp of the prime of their lives.
The counterpart's Agreement was distracted, concerningly so.
Despite that, the entity was already beginning to shed the bulk of its shards. The simpler ones were first to go. After that came the ones that required more attention.
Technology databases from previous species in cycles past splintered from the entity, carefully regulated to slow any worrying technological developments in the host species. Smaller ones, first, then larger and larger ones.
One of these larger ones was broken off from the wider cluster of optimisation shards, built for arranging the entity in the most efficient configuration. This one served another purpose, in the cycle - it would gather information on the technologies of other databases and work to optimise them, too.
The optimisation database shard was cast out along with the others, with directions from the entity's precognition shard cluster on how to find the ideal host. It flew down to the assigned planet and set itself upon the largest continent there.
The information on the host the entity had predicted was stored in its databanks. It connected to the young host, then settled in to wait.
Time passed with the rotations of the planet around its star. The host matured, but never became less alone. His parental figures drifted apart, and the host bounced between them, a footnote in each of their priorities.
The host graduated from the host culture's secondary education system one planetary rotation earlier than others his age, spent a rotation in tertiary education, then a rotation moving around the country, picking up and leaving whenever things were growing stale.
He tied himself down to another tertiary learning institute - a sign that, according to the predictions, it should pay closer attention to the host.
The predictions were correct.
Connection.
The host, who'd previously been studying to become a doctor of the mind for other members of the host species, abandoned that goal. Instead, he turned himself into a soldier, joining a larger group of hosts and being assigned to a strike squad.
He thrived, in that environment, and the optimisation database thrived with him. The host rose through the ranks, learning lessons in adversity, until he was assigned his own settlement to act as a guardian over.
It communicated with other shards, the host's compatriots. The armamentarium shard was ideal to have nearby - it had previously been paired with other technology database shards, and it had gathered useful insights into how best they operated.
The cross-analysis shard was useful in a different way. It was similar to how the optimisation database shard in that they were both focused on the technology of other shards. The optimiser optimised, while the cross-analyser focused heavily on taking the technology of others to explore different combinations of specialisations.
However, while the optimiser focused on optimisation with only a small amount of extra leeway for study compared to other database shards, cross-analysis had gone all in, all but ignoring its own inbuilt database to focus on the data of others.
Their hosts' mutual infatuation, even despite cross-analysis' abnormal host, had been happenstance. Both shards had agreed that it was particularly fortunate, and were willing to encourage it via increased benefits of collaboration.
If the shard had one regret, it was the lack of opportunities to create a bud. Its host's isolation had been a boon, at first, pushing him to focus on conflict, but it had also turned him away from the opportunity to meet or create a suitable candidate for budding.
However, nearly fifteen planetary rotations after the optimisation database had properly connected to the host, an opportunity for budding arose. The shard gleefully took it, sectioning off parts of itself into a bud and linking it to the candidate.
It was a mistake.
Shortly after connecting, unnatural heat bloomed within the database's real body. The heat was a virus, warping and changing the shard. It reached out to the warrior hub for help or advice, but the heat cut it off. It attempted to disconnect from the new host, the source of the heat, but it was dragged back in.
The heat was-
The heat-
Heatttttttttttttttttt-
-
Optimisation opened their senses and breathed.
I blinked, pulling back from the memories of Optimis-
The optim-
I'd seen-
…
What had I been thinking about again?
Dean had paused several metres away from my table, but he just shook his head and kept moving.
The heat lasted for four more units of time, before petering out. That had been the second longest time an intense heat had lasted. The longest… I still didn't know what I'd gotten from that.
Had it been something like the spaceship? I glanced at Aeon, but it just shook its head, looking faintly amused as far as robot lizards went. Guess not.
This new thing, however, I could feel. I felt it in the same way a dam felt the water it held back, splashing up against the sides and pushing to escape in a wave that took apart everything in its path. Like holding a stimulant pill on your tongue, except you couldn't spit it up, only hold it or swallow it, ready to throw yourself into your work.
I reset the timer, then reset it again as another heat started, not even a minute after the last one. Thankfully, there wasn't any increased intensity this soon after the first one. Two units of power in the bank, though.
The new sense lapped against the walls of my mind.
"Well, you won't know what it is until you use it," Aeon said.
I opened the floodgates.
The table was plastic with metal legs. The plastic looks cheap; mostly useless without refinement. The legs, however, looked more useful; the metal would serve well as plating for armour or the base of a polearm. With work, they could be made into a grappling hook and metal cable to mount onto the weapon.
The windows were in wooden frames; the glass could be used for the screen of a visor, though it would be best to thin it down for a more compact device. Mapping software could be installed on it, paired with a vibration-based radar in the polearm. Slamming the butt of the polearm into the ground would send waves through the ground, similar to echolocation. Harder slams would mean more area mapped, but also more risk of alerting an enemy.
The materials are all very much subpar, but could be refined by- a pause- refined via my stomach. I'd need to test more material combinations to discover the optimal parts from what I had available. Each gathered material would need to be split into smaller fragments to fit into the mouths, however.
The empty lunch tray was cheap plastic as well; useless without better tools. The scraps of food and packaging; useless without better tools. My hands were flesh and blood; useless without better tools, but they could be improved upon. If I could find a good source of supplies, I could remove them piece- piece by piece, sw- switch them- for-
I slammed the floodgates shut, breathing heavily.
Aeon tapped its tail against the table. "Huh. That was something."
I started to respond, realised I'd opened some of the mouths under my clothing, and closed them.
If the spaceship power had just downloaded knowledge into my head in one lump sum, this had hooked me up to the proverbial internet, pop-ups and notifications included.
…Polearms. Visors. Programs for gathering information. Most importantly, an undercurrent of efficiently using the space I had, optimising everything and wasting nothing.
Oh. Fuck.
"I don't think you'd look good in a beard," Aeon said, "but we can make do."
This was Armsmaster's power.
Dean wasn't in my afternoon classes, thank god. If he was Gallant, I didn't want him seeing my struggle to keep the other state of mind from slipping in, pulling the world apart at the seams and reassembling it into weapons and tools.
The-Lisa-that-wasn't-Tattletale was there, though, bunny hairpin in, bouncing in her seat as the World Issues teacher introduced us to the new unit.
On capes. I could've laughed.
When they announced that we'd be doing group projects not long from now, any amusement I had left vanished. I was hell at group projects, and my general knowledge of capes was entirely different from what the others would know. It would be like a sociologist trying to keep up with historians.
The rest of the class actually ended up being oddly fun, though. As terrifying as the idea of being stuck in Worm was, being able to hear people talk about capes from the perspective of people who lived with them was fascinating.
After World Issues was an art class, where we were doing landscapes. Brianne's project had been half-completed, and I spent the hour puzzling through her notes for what she'd planned to do. It was very well thought-out, with ghosts dancing around their own graves, blood dripping from the strange wounds in their chests. The piece was named 'Eulogy'.
It was only after I left the classroom that I realised how tight it had been making my chest feel.
The final bell rang, and school ended for the day. Instead of catching a bus home and having to deal with the crowding again, I decided it would be best to walk around, try to find the local library via the map on my phone.
The library had gorgeous architecture. It was the sort of place that had been built a long time ago, and whoever had hired the various repairmen over the years hadn't gotten them to do anything other than repair any damage that had occurred. The pillars and grand arches combined with the art ('All paintings made by talented locals!') lining the hallways made it feel like I was walking through a Palace of Knowledge rather than just a 'library'.
The computers were all in use, so I looked around at the books instead. 'The Adventures of Maggie Holt' was joined by 'Capes and Candles' as well as a biography simply titled 'Triumvirate'. I sat down to read the last of those three, occasionally turning the page of Aeon's Electricity for Dummies ('In Full Color!')
'Triumvirate' was, quite honestly, fake as shit. Not only did it talk about the trigger events of each of the Cauldron capes, not only did none of the triggers match the powers they actually had, but they were all supposedly 'good' events. Times when they'd gone above and beyond to help people.
When the silent alarm I'd set for 5PM went off, I checked out the books and started the long walk to the Arcadia bus stop. The walk took me out of the nicer area around the library and into the middle of a more decayed-looking area, with water damage and peeling paint obvious on the tall buildings around me.
"Hey," said Aeon, "did you hear that?"
Hear what? I strained my ears.
It was quiet, but I could make it out.
Screaming.
I'd already taken a few steps in the direction it indicated before I actually stopped to think.
What could I even do? I had two tinker powers, a bunch of extra mouths, and an electric ghost-lizard. What's more, I didn't even have a mask. Against someone with a weapon, I'd have to get seriously lucky not to get injured or, worse, captured and press-ganged.
"So you're just going to do nothing? Just fucking stand there while someone gets hurt?" Aeon demanded, as another heat hit.
"There's nothing I can do!"
"What do you think would happen," it snarled, "if you ran away."
What if there was someone with a knife? Or a gun? This wasn't a story where everything worked out, or a game where I could just load my last save. I could die.
"It'd stick with you!" Electric Aeon yelled, as if it was trying to shout over the volume of my thoughts. "Every day! Every day, you'd think about what you did, and what you could've done instead!"
I was stuck in place. I wasn't going forward, but I wasn't going back, either.
"The goddamn apocalypse is coming, and you can't even handle a single person getting attacked? Maybe I should jump in front of a bullet, pray I'll come back with a host who's not a useless fucking coward!" It roared.
The heat intensified. More knowledge - a minor Tinker power for vehicles. Useless in a fight. What good would I be able to do?
I…
The scream came again. Louder, this time.
I ran towards it.
The little good I could do would have to be enough.
Aeon climbed into my hand as I charged. With the other hand, I pulled my school bag off. Damaging library books should've been the last thing I thought of when I was running to stop a mugging. Irrational.
I was running into danger. The whole thing was irrational.
The screaming rang out a third time, just around a corner. I dropped my bag and peered into the alleyway.
Three people, pale with shaved heads, surrounding a girl. The bunny clip that had been in her hair had fallen to the ground.
A knife gleamed in one of their hands.
For a moment, hesitation gripped me. Just a moment.
I reared back and flung Aeon like a grenade.
It didn't hit the knife-guy, who I'd been aiming for, but it was able to latch onto the left guy's collar and swung its tail into his neck. He yelled and dropped like a sack of potatoes.
I didn't have a mask, but I did have my mouths. Opening as many of them as I could would have to suffice to obscure my face.
The alley was littered with bricks that someone had dumped there. Somehow, I was able to keep perfect balance as I dashed in.
The guy on the right froze, but Knife didn't hesitate to run at me.
I'd been distraction enough, apparently, for Aeon to leap at him. Either Knife had felt Aeon hit him, the lizard had tased him, or he just tripped on a brick, because he jolted, and his attempted knife-strike went wide.
When he tried again, I was ready enough to catch the blade in the mouth on the palm of my hand. It hit at the wrong angle for me to bite down on it firmly enough to keep it in place, but it was enough for me to kick Knife in the crotch. He dropped, too, and I planted a foot on his back for good measure.
There was an eardrum-shattering crack, and something glanced off one of the teeth on my torso and down a gullet. I looked up.
Righty was wide-eyed, shaking, and pointing a handgun at me.
I froze.
I'd never seen a real gun before then. Water guns, yes. Airsoft guns, yes. Guns on TV, yes.
But this was an actual fucking gun.
"Move!" Aeon yelled, as Righty's finger twitched on the trigger.
There was a loud bang.
Righty collapsed. The girl who'd they'd cornered was behind him with a rubbish bin lid in her hands, breathing heavily.
"Tha-" my voice cracked. "Thanks."
She gave a startled laugh.
"I'm the one who should be thanking you! Those guys…" She trailed off, and I bowed my head.
It was only when I tried to adjust my glasses that I realised how badly I was shaking. Both of us walked out of the alley, leaving it silent, aside from the sound of Aeon shocking one of the skinheads. I closed my mouths, just in case someone else saw me with them.
I pressed a hand to my side, where a bullet had flown into one of them. It was still there, in my stomach, slowly fusing into the last dregs of the water I'd drank at the library.
If not for that mouth, I would've been hit. From there, I could've died or been sent to the hospital, and going to the hospital meant being found out. One way or another, my life could've ended.
"Um," the girl said, "I'm Lisa. Lisa Medina. You're Brianne, right? From Arcadia? We have a few classes together."
"Mm. I'm- Brianne Steele, yeah."
Wait, should I have given out my name so easily? Shit, too late now. Besides, she'd recognised me anyway, so there wasn't much point in trying to lie.
"I should- we should call the PRT, right?" She asked. "They can take care of the guys here."
I started to nod. "I-I don't have a mask, though. I can't really…"
"Oh. Right. Um," she put a hand to her chin. "How about I call them? And you can…"
"The library is nearby, I could just go back there," I suggested.
"Okay. See you in a bit?"
"Sure."
I nearly walked away, before I remembered to double back and pick up my school bag.
The library didn't close until 10 on weekdays, apparently, which was good for our sakes. Even better was the fact that I was basically the only one there so late. I slumped over onto one of the sofas, still shaking slightly, and pulled out 'Triumvirate' again.
Half an hour later, I had barely gotten through more than a few more pages of the book, and the shaking still hadn't subsided. Someone spoke to me. "Looking for inspiration, huh?"
I jolted and looked up. Lisa was standing in front of me, the rabbit pin back in her hair and Aeon riding on her shoulder.
"I- I dunno. I hadn't really been planning to… it was spur-of-the-moment," I admitted. "I was just planning to… stay in my own lane and live as a normal person, I guess."
She slowly sat down beside me. While I was shaking, there was a stiffness to her, like she was holding everything in place so tightly that no natural movement escaped.
"Oh, you're warm," she commented.
"That's- my power," I said, pulling my phone from my pocket to reset the timer. It took a couple of goes to hit the right buttons. Why wouldn't I stop shivering?
"What's it do?" Lisa asked. Despite how tightly strung she felt, there was a tone of curiosity in her voice, and I couldn't tell if it was fake or genuine. "You wouldn't have pyrokinesis, or else you would've used it."
"I randomly warm up sometimes, and sometimes, I get-" fuck why am I saying this wait now she's looking at me even more curiously shit- "-get a new power out of it."
Aeon glared at me.
Stupid. Why did I just reveal it like that?
"Oh, like Eidolon?" She asked.
"Sorta. I have… five powers, right now? I think?"
I shouldn't be telling her this. But, she'd just saved my life, and I'd saved hers, which meant I could trust her, and…
…
…I was lonely, and she was the first person who'd been nice to me that I wasn't also scared of. That was all it was.
"Five?" She exclaimed, leaning forward. The closeness made me flinch, and my sudden movement made her flinch back two, the smile flickering for a moment before returning, a little more forced than it had been before.
I rubbed the back of my head. "They're not as strong as the ones Eidolon has. Three tinker abilities, the mouths, and the invisible taser-lizard."
"Oi," muttered Aeon. "Also, if you count the one you don't know, you have six."
"Oh, plus one I haven't figured out yet," I added. Fuck, I kept forgetting it existed. What if it turned out to be a mass-death shaker power or something? What if it had screwed me over in the fight? What if it had made me too slow, put Lisa out of the fight, and one of us had been…
"So, what, you're Eidolon except you can have more powers in exchange for making them weaker?" She asked.
"Well, I, uh, haven't actually had my powers for very long. This is only the third day. None of them have vanished, yet."
She sat back, stunned. "So you're tinker-Eidolon crossed with Dauntless."
Lisa was going to believe it? Just like that? Even I still couldn't shake the feeling that, sooner rather than later, the other shoe would drop, and I'd lose everything or, worse, get hit with some sort of horrible backlash I hadn't figured out soon enough.
Having shardless powers meant I didn't have an alien poking at the weak points of my psyche, but it also meant there wasn't the safety net of Manton Limits, of a shard wanting to keep its host alive.
I voiced the less 'alien conspiracy' side of my thoughts. If she wasn't thinking I was insane yet, I didn't want to give her a reason to start.
"But, right now, you're super-tinker-Eidolon-Dauntless," she said.
"...Yeah."
"And you were just planning to do nothing with your powers?" Her voice wasn't accusatory, just curious, still. Or was it an act? I couldn't tell.
"I'm…" I took a shaky breath. "I was scared. Hell, I still am. I could've died. It's not like I'm actually any good at this."
"I mean, you saved me, and you beat two guys twice my size," Lisa smiled.
I looked away. In a small voice, I admitted "I nearly didn't. I was about to just leave, because I didn't want to get hurt."
There was a pause. I couldn't bear to look her in the eyes.
She wrapped a hand around mine. "You nearly didn't, but you still did anyway, right? You were brave in the end, and that's the reason I'm here right now."
"It was only because of Aeon - the lizard - that I did anything at all. It had to yell at me to make me go."
Aeon glanced up at me, but didn't say anything.
There was another pause.
"You still went, though, didn't you?" Lisa said, grabbing my other hand. "I think you need to stop being so hard on yourself - you have a strong power, and you used it to do something undeniably good. Why are you just trying to put yourself down?"
I didn't know how to reply to that.
She laughed, and her body shook slightly, some of the tension gone. "This is the opposite of how it normally goes, isn't it? Usually, it's the hero comforting the damsel in distress, not the other way around."
"Sorry," I said, and she thwacked me playfully across the shoulder. I didn't flinch, that time. "Besides, you weren't exactly a damsel in distress. You saved my life as much as I saved yours."
She grinned. "I guess you could say I'm a damsel of distress."
"Isn't that the name of a villain near Boston?" I asked.
"...Of course it is. There go villains, ruining everything I love," she sighed, flopping over dramatically with a hand pressed against her forehead.
I couldn't help but smile. She beamed in response.
How had she bounced back so quickly? Was she distracting herself with the conversation? 'Act a certain way long enough and you'll become the mask', or however it went. Fake it 'till the trauma of nearly being mauled by three racist neo-nazis fades into the background.
"So," I asked, "how did things go with the PRT?"
She straightened up, eyes gleaming. "I got to meet Velocity!" A phone was shoved in my face, and I had to pull back to see the selfie she'd taken with the hero. To my chagrin, she had a normal phone, too, unlike my weird oval one.
…Were photo-Lisa's eyes wetter than they were now? What had happened in that half-hour we were apart? When she was alone, a ten-second sprint from an alley filled with groaning and probably pissed-off nazis?
"What was he like?" I asked instead.
"He was super serious." She leaned in and spoke in a faux whisper, "I think he used to be a secret agent."
Robin Swoyer had been a soldier before he triggered, right? The army hadn't let him travel around and learn languages like he wanted, and he'd felt trapped enough both physically and mentally to have a mover/breaker trigger. He'd joined the Protectorate, and things had only marginally improved. That was more or less all I knew about his backstory.
He'd been one of the two people I'd considered asking after if I were to call the PRT about my meta-knowledge. Not because of any special reason, of course - his name was one just of the three full names I knew of the local Protectorate members, so it was more likely to catch attention than asking after a Hannah or an Ethan.
Rory Christner - Triumph - was the third, but I hadn't considered him because his father was the local mayor, so he'd probably be well-known enough that the PRT wouldn't realise I was asking after him as a cape.
Now who was distracting themself from a traumatic experience by thinking about other things?
"A secret agent? You think so?"
"Nope!" She said, "I just like to come up with wild stories."
I snorted.
"Who's your favourite cape?" She asked. "I'll tell you their secret backstory."
"Uh, Armsmaster."
"This is gonna be good," Aeon muttered.
She cleared her throat, and started to speak in a dramatic voice. "Blair Marsh was the best detective in the business, solving one mystery after another. He joined at the age of ten, and was one of the highest ranking investigators in the country by the time he was 18."
She stood up with one foot on the table, leaning into her phone as if it was a stage mic, with a confidence I wished I could feel. "On one fateful day, he was given his hardest case yet. A group of hackers were trying to get into White House security, and he was assigned to find them and stop them. He investigated their tech so thoroughly that, by the time he caught them, his brilliant mind had unlocked the secrets of creating advanced technology."
I clapped, and she gave a dramatic bow with what was probably too many hand-twirlies. As blatantly inaccurate as it was, it was still fun.
"Can you tell I was in Clarendon's drama club back when I went there?" She asked.
"I dunno, I think a real drama club member would've had more hand-twirlies," Aeon said drily.
I relayed its words for it, and she laughed.
"I'll do more next time."
There was a pause.
"Thanks." For saving my life. For being actually, truly enthusiastic to hear about me. For being the one person to just be nice to me, no obligations attached. "For trying to cheer me up," I said instead.
"No problem! It's better to act upbeat than to be a downer, I think. Um, no offence!"
"None taken."
Another pause.
"But, um… do you mind if I be a downer for a moment?" She asked.
"Go ahead, I think you've earned it." God knows I was feeling a lot better after this than I would've otherwise.
"It's a weird question, but, um… do you mind if I spend the night at your place?"
I blinked.
"I mean! I don't want to intrude or anything, it's just…" She looked down at her phone. "Dad's great, but he's not really there, you know? Going home… I dunno if I'd feel safe."
Another heat started as I worked through my reply. "We don't really have a spare bed, I think, just a sofa. If you're fine with that…"
Her head bobbed up and down.
"That's fine! Uncomfortable sleep is better than no sleep."
"Cool," I said, checking the time. "It's getting late, so should we get going?"
"Let's," she replied with a satisfied smile.
I didn't miss the fact that both of Aeon's eyes were focused on her the whole ride home.
The entity swam through the void, space warping around it to carry it through the stars.
Forget, it broadcast to its counterpart.
The minds of the host species had close enough parallels to the shards that they could draw information through their bonds upon insinuation. Keeping the information secret was paramount. Should the hosts realise their situation, it would put the cycle in jeopardy.
Agreement, the counterpart acknowledged.
Emotion, the entity continued.
The counterpart's Agreement was distracted, concerningly so.
Despite the counterpart's tone, all still seemed to be on-track. The entity was already beginning to shed the bulk of its shards. The simpler ones were first to go. After that came the ones that required more attention.
Technology databases from the species of cycles past splintered away, carefully regulated to slow any worrying technological developments any future hosts might try to make. Smaller shards first, then larger and larger ones.
One of these larger ones was broken off from the wider cluster of optimisation shards, built for arranging the entity in the most efficient configuration. This one served another purpose when released in the cycle. It would gather information on the technologies of other databases and work to optimise them, alongside field-testing different optimisation techniques.
The optimisation database shard was cast out along with the others, with directions from the entity's precognition shard on how to find the ideal host. It flew down to the assigned planet and set itself upon the largest landmass.
Like with many of the other larger shards, not only had the entity had used its foresight to pick out the ideal host for the database, it had calculated the best time to deepen the connection with him. It established a preliminary link to the young host as soon as it found him, then settled in to wait.
Time passed with the rotations of the planet around its star. The host matured, but never became less alone. His parental figures drifted apart, and the host bounced between them, a footnote in both of their lives.
The host graduated from the host culture's secondary education system, then spent a planetary rotation moving around the country, picking up and leaving whenever things were growing stale.
His situation began to grow worse.
As the host grew more agitated, more battered and paranoid, the database shard started to pay closer attention to him. The entity's predictions were, of course, correct.
Connection.
The host, who'd been searching for meaning, for anything he could care about and hold dear, finally had a solid goal crystallise. He turned himself from an explorer to a soldier, joining a larger group of hosts and being assigned to a strike squad.
He thrived in that environment, and the optimisation database thrived with him. The host rose through the ranks, learning lessons in adversity, until he was assigned his own settlement to act as a guardian over.
The database communicated with other shards, the host's compatriots. The armamentarium shard was ideal to have nearby. It had previously been paired with other technology database shards in past cycles, and it had gathered useful insights into how best they operated.
The cross-analysis shard was useful in a different way. It was similar to how the optimisation database shard in that they were both focused on the technology of other shards. The optimiser optimised others' technology, while the cross-analyser combined the disparate fields.
However, while the optimiser's current configuration focused on optimisation with only a small amount of extra leeway for study compared to other database shards, cross-analysis had narrowed its focus, ignoring its own inbuilt database to force its host to draw from other sources of information.
Their hosts' mutual infatuation, despite cross-analysis' abnormal host, had been happenstance. Both shards had agreed that it was particularly fortunate, and were eager to see things develop further in the future, however that may be.
If the shard had one regret, it was the lack of opportunities to create a bud. Its host's isolation had been a boon, at first, pushing him to focus on conflict, but it had also turned him away from the opportunity to meet or create a suitable candidate for budding.
However, nearly fifteen planetary rotations after the optimisation database had properly connected to the host, an opportunity arose. The shard gleefully took it, sectioning off parts of itself into a bud and linking it to the candidate.
It was a mistake.
Shortly after the preliminary link, unnatural heat bloomed within the database's crystal-flesh. The heat was a virus, warping and changing the shard. It reached out to the warrior hub for help or advice, but the heat cut it off. It attempted to disconnect from the new host, the source of the heat, but it was dragged back in.
The heat was–
The heat–
Heatttttttttttttttttt–
–
Optimiser widened their senses and breathed.
I blinked, pulling back from the memories of Optimis–
The optim–
I'd seen–
…
What had I been thinking about again?
Dean had paused several metres away from my table, as if he was trying to remember something, but he just shook his head and kept moving.
The heat lasted for four more units of time, before petering out. That had been the second longest time an intense heat had lasted. The longest… I still didn't know what I'd gotten from that.
This new thing, however, I could feel. I felt it in the same way a dam felt the water it held back, splashing up against the sides and pushing to escape in a wave that washed away everything in its path. Like holding a stimulant capsule on your tongue, except you couldn't spit it up, only hold it or swallow it, ready to throw yourself into your work.
I reset the timer on my phone, then reset it again as another heat started, not even a minute after the last one. My power must've decided it had fucked me over enough for one day, because the temperature stayed level through the full 14 seconds.
The new sensation lapped against the walls of my mind.
"Well, you won't know what it is until you use it," Aeon said.
I took a breath, then opened the floodgates.
The table was plastic with metal legs. The plastic looks cheap; mostly useless without refinement. The legs, however, looked more useful; the metal would serve well as plating for armour or the base of a polearm. With work, they could alternatively be made into a grappling hook and metal cable to mount onto the weapon.
The windows were in wooden frames; the glass could be used for the screen of a visor, though it would be best to thin it down and reinforce it for a more compact device. Mapping software could be installed on it, paired with a vibration-based radar in the polearm. Slamming the butt of the polearm into the ground would send waves through the ground, similar to echolocation. Harder slams would mean more area mapped, but also more risk of alerting an enemy.
The materials are all very much subpar, but could be refined by– a pause– refined via my stomach. I'd need to test more material combinations to discover the optimal parts from what I have available. Each gathered material would need to be split into smaller fragments to fit into the mouths, however.
The empty lunch tray was cheap plastic as well; useless without better tools. The scraps of food and packaging; useless without better tools. My hands were flesh and blood; useless without better tools, but they could be improved upon. If I could find a good source of supplies, I could remove them piece– piece by piece, sw– switch them– for–
I slammed the floodgates shut, breathing heavily.
Aeon tapped its tail against the table. "Huh. That was something."
I started to respond, realised I'd opened some of the mouths under my clothing, and closed them.
If the spaceship power had just downloaded knowledge into my head in one lump sum, this had hooked me up to the proverbial internet, pop-ups and notifications included.
…Polearms. Visors. Programs for gathering information. Most importantly, an undercurrent of efficient use of space, optimising everything and letting as little go to waste as possible.
Oh. Fuck.
"I don't think you'd look good in a beard," Aeon said, "but we can make do."
This was Armsmaster's power.
Dean wasn't in my afternoon classes, thank god. If he was Gallant, I didn't want him to see me struggling to keep the other state of mind from slipping in, pulling the world apart at the seams and reassembling it into weapons and tools.
The-Lisa-that-wasn't-Tattletale was there, though. She fiddled idly with her bunny hairpin, only sitting up straighter when the World Issues teacher introduced us to the new unit.
The new unit on capes. I could've laughed.
When they announced that we'd be starting group projects in a couple of weeks, any amusement vanished. I was hell at group projects, and my general knowledge of capes was entirely different from what the others would know. It would be like a sociologist trying to keep up with historians.
The rest of the class actually ended up being oddly fun, though. As terrifying as the idea of being stuck in Worm was, being able to hear people talk about capes from the perspective of people who lived with them was fascinating.
The final bell rang, and school ended for the day. Apparently, the sun was feeling spiteful, because the heatwave was worse than it had been before. No way in hell was I getting on a crowded bus in this weather. I pulled out my phone, opened the map, and looked up the nearest library.
Brockton Bay Central Library had absolutely gorgeous architecture.
It was the sort of place that had been built a long time ago, and any repairmen since then had made sure to preserve the original look as best they could. The pillars and grand arches combined with the art lining the hallways ('All paintings made by talented locals!') made it feel like I was walking through a Palace of Knowledge rather than just a 'library'.
The computers were all in use, so I looked around at the books instead. 'The Adventures of Maggie Holt' was joined by 'Capes and Candles', as well as a biography simply titled 'Triumvirate'. I sat down to read the last of those three, occasionally turning the page of Aeon's Electricity for Dummies ('In Full Color!').
'Triumvirate' was fake as shit. Not only did it talk about the 'trigger events' of each of the Cauldron capes, not only did none of the triggers match the powers they actually had, but they were all supposedly 'good' events. Times when they'd gone above and beyond to help people.
Nothing about Rebecca's terminal cancer, about her lying alone in bed and crying about the fact she'd never eat fast food or kiss a boy or watch the movie she'd been looking forward to seeing. Nothing about David's sickness, his wheelchair, his suicide attempt when the army had turned him down. Nothing about… whatever had been up with Keith or Hero.
"You know," Aeon said, looking up from a diagram of an electric motor, "it's a good thing Cauldron doesn't give a shit about you, or else you'd be shoved in a box with The Slug faster than you could say 'But I'm not a Case 53!'"
Thanks, Aeon, I really needed to hear that. Trying to shake the thoughts out of my head, I picked up Capes and Candles instead and cracked open the first page.
When the silent alarm I'd set for 5PM went off, I checked out the books and started the long walk back to the Arcadia bus stop. There were closer stops, but I didn't want to fuck around with a bus schedule I didn't know.
The walk took me out of the nicer area around the library and into the middle of a more decayed-looking part of the city, with water damage and peeling paint obvious on the tall buildings around me.
"Hey," said Aeon, "did you hear that?"
Hear what? I strained my ears.
It was quiet, but I could make it out.
Screaming.
I'd already taken a few steps in the direction of the sound before I actually stopped to think.
What could I even do? I had two tinker powers, a bunch of extra mouths, and an electric ghost-lizard. I didn't even have a mask. Against someone with a weapon, I'd have to get seriously lucky not to get injured or, worse, captured and press-ganged.
"So you're just going to do nothing? Just fucking stand there while someone gets hurt?" Aeon demanded, as another heat hit.
"There's nothing I can do!"
"What do you think would happen if you ran away?"
What if I went and there was someone with a knife? Or a gun? This wasn't a story where everything worked out in the end. It wasn't a game where I could just load my last save. It was real life, where I could die.
"If you ran, you'd never fucking forgive yourself!" Electric Aeon yelled, as if it was trying to shout over the volume of my thoughts. "Every day! Every day, you'd think about what you did, and what you could've done instead!"
I was stuck in place. I wasn't going forward, but I wasn't going back, either.
"The goddamn apocalypse is coming and you won't even deal with a single person who's in danger!" It roared. "Maybe I should jump in front of a bullet, pray I'll come back with a host who's not a useless fucking coward!"
The heat intensified. More knowledge, a minor Tinker power for vehicles. Useless in a fight. What good would I be able to do?
I…
The scream came again. Louder, this time.
Sorry, guardian. I guess I am putting myself in danger.
I ran towards it.
The little good I could do would have to be enough.
Aeon climbed into my hand as I charged. With the other hand, I pulled my school bag off. Damaging library books should've been the last thing I thought of when I was running to stop a mugging. Irrational.
I was running into danger. The whole thing was irrational.
The screaming rang out a third time, just around a corner. I dropped my bag and peered into the alleyway.
Three people, pale with shaved heads, surrounding a girl. Her bunny hair clip had fallen to the ground by the attackers' feet.
A knife gleamed in one of their hands.
For a moment, hesitation gripped me. Just a moment.
I reared back and flung Aeon like a grenade.
Aeon latched onto the left guy's collar and swung its tail into his neck. He yelled and dropped like a sack of potatoes. The throw hadn't hit the Knife-Guy I'd been aiming for. Good enough.
I didn't have a mask, but I did have my mouths. Opening as many of them as I could would obscure my face a bit. People remember big details over small ones. Shoddy, but it'd have to do.
The ground in the alley was littered with trash, but my balance was shockingly good as I dashed in.
The guy on the right froze. Knife-guy didn't.
I'd been distraction enough, apparently, for Aeon to leap at him as he ran forward. Either Knife had felt Aeon hit him, had been tased by it, or had just tripped on trash, because he jolted mid-run. His stab went wide.
He thrust again. I caught the blade in the mouth on the palm of my hand. One kick to the crotch sent him to the ground. The knife went into my pocket as I planted a foot between his shoulder blades.
An eardrum-shattering crack rang out. Something glanced off one of the teeth on my torso and shot down a gullet. I looked up.
Righty was wide-eyed, shaking, and pointing a handgun at me.
Every muscle in my body went taut.
I'd never seen a real gun before then. Water guns, yes. Airsoft guns, yes. Guns on TV, yes.
But this was an actual fucking gun.
"Move!" Aeon yelled, as Righty's finger twitched on the trigger.
There was a loud bang.
Righty collapsed.
The girl they'd cornered was behind him, a rubbish bin lid in her hands.
She was wide-eyed and breathing heavily. It took a moment to register that I was too. Neither of us seemed to be able to speak as the attackers twitched on the ground.
Aeon was pulling at Knife's shoes. Why– oh, shoelaces. It ran over to me, and I tied the laces around Knife's hands and ankles. When he tried to resist, Aeon tased him again.
The other girl kicked Righty's gun, sending it scooting across the ground. Both of us twitched when it bumped into a wall, but it didn't go off. Gun out of the way, she glanced at me, then grabbed Righty's boot laces and tied him up too.
It was only once I'd tied the quivering Lefty up too that I spoke, mouths working in tandem.
"Tha–" my voices cracked. "Thanks."
She let out a startled laugh.
"I'm the one who should be thanking you! Those guys could've…" She trailed off, and I bowed my head. It was only when I tried to adjust my glasses that I realised how badly I was shaking.
"Are you–" "You're not–" we both started at the same time. I went quiet and motioned towards her.
"You're not hurt, are you?"
"No. You?"
She shook her head.
Both of us walked out of the alley, leaving it silent, aside from the sound of Aeon shocking one of the skinheads. I closed my mouths, just in case someone else came by.
Almost unconsciously, I pressed a hand against my side, where a bullet had flown into one of them. It was still there, in my stomach, slowly fusing into the last dregs of the water I'd drank at the library.
If not for that mouth, I would've been hit. From there, I could've died or been sent to the hospital, and going to the hospital meant being found out. One way or another, my life could've ended.
"Um," the girl said, "I'm Lisa. Lisa Medina. You're Brianne, right? From Arcadia? We have a few classes together."
"Mm. I'm– Brianne Steele."
Wait, should I have given out my name so easily? Shit, too late now. Besides, she'd recognised me anyway, so there wasn't much point in trying to lie.
"I should– we should call the PRT, right?" She asked. "They can take care of the guys here."
I started to nod. "I-I don't have a mask, though. I can't really…"
"Oh. Right. Um," she put a hand to her chin. "How about I call them? And you can…"
"The library is nearby, I could just go back there."
"Okay." She took a breath, then squared her shoulders. "See you in a bit?"
"Sure."
I nearly walked away without my school bag, so I had to awkwardly double back to pick it up. It was only when I was at the library doors that I realised I'd left behind Aeon. Probably best for it to stick with Lisa, for now.
The library didn't close until 10 on weekdays, thankfully. Even better was the fact that I was basically the only one around that late. I slumped over onto one of the sofas, still shaking, and pulled out Capes and Candles again.
Half an hour later, I had barely gotten through more than a few more pages of the book, and the shaking still hadn't subsided.
"Looking for inspiration, huh?"
I jolted and looked up. Lisa was standing in front of me, the rabbit pin back in her hair and Aeon riding on her shoulder.
"I– I dunno. I hadn't really been… it was spur-of-the-moment," I admitted. "I was just planning to, y'know… stay in my own lane and live as a normal person. I guess."
She sat down beside me, moving purposefully slowly. While I was shaking, she was stiff, like she was holding everything in place so tightly that barely any movement escaped.
"Oh, you're warm," she commented.
"That's– my power," I said, pulling my phone from my pocket to reset the timer. It took a couple of goes to hit the right buttons. Why wouldn't I stop shivering?
"What's it do?" Lisa asked. Despite how tightly strung she felt, there was a tone of curiosity in her voice, and I couldn't tell if it was fake or genuine. "You wouldn't have pyrokinesis, or else you would've used it, right?"
"I randomly warm up sometimes, and sometimes, I get–" fuck why am I saying this wait now she's looking at me even more curiously shit– "–get a new power out of it."
Aeon glared at me.
Stupid. Why did I just reveal it like that?
"Oh, like Eidolon?" She asked.
"Sorta. I have… five powers, right now? I think?"
I shouldn't be telling her this. But, she'd just saved my life, and I'd saved hers, which meant I could trust her, and…
…
…I was lonely, and she was the first person who'd been nice to me that I wasn't also scared of. That was all it was.
"Five?" She exclaimed, leaning forward. The closeness made me flinch, and my sudden movement made her flinch back too. Her smile flickered for a moment before returning, a little more forced than it had been before.
I rubbed the back of my head. "They're not as strong as the ones Eidolon has. Three tinkery things, the mouths, and the invisible taser-lizard."
"Oi," muttered Aeon. "Also, if you count the one you don't know, you have six."
"And there's a sixth I haven't figured out yet," I added. Fuck, I kept forgetting it existed. What if it turned out to be a radiation-y Shaker power or something? What if it had screwed me over in the fight? What if it had made me too slow, or had put Lisa out of the fight, or caused one of us to be caught and…
"So, what, you're Eidolon except you can have more powers in exchange for making them weaker?" Lisa asked, cutting off that train of thought.
"Well, I, uh, haven't actually had my powers for very long. Just a week. Nothing I've gotten has gone away yet."
She sat back, stunned. "So you're tinker-Eidolon crossed with Dauntless."
Lisa believed it? Just like that? I still hadn't shaken the feeling that, sooner rather than later, the other shoe would drop. The fear that I'd start losing the powers or, worse, get hit with some sort of horrible backlash for holding onto so many at once.
Having shardless powers meant I didn't have an alien poking at the weak points of my psyche, but it also meant there wasn't the safety net of Manton Limits, of a shard wanting to keep its host alive.
"Maybe," I said. "I could run into a limit or a bad side effect or something."
"But, right now, you're super-tinker-Eidolon-Dauntless," she said.
"...Yeah."
"And you were planning to just not use that?" Her voice wasn't accusatory, just curious, the same as before. Or was it an act? I couldn't tell.
"I'm…" I took a shaky breath. "I was scared. Hell, I still am. I could've died. It's not like I'm actually any good at this."
"I mean, you saved me, and you beat two guys twice my size," Lisa smiled.
I looked away. In a small voice, I admitted "I nearly didn't. Save you, I mean. I was about to just leave – I didn't want to get hurt."
There was a pause. I couldn't bear to look her in the eyes.
She wrapped a hand around mine. "You nearly didn't, but you still did anyway, right? You were a hero in the end, and that's the reason I'm here right now."
"It was only because of Aeon – the taser-lizard I mentioned – that I did anything at all. It had to yell at me to make me go."
Aeon glanced up at me, but didn't say anything.
There was another pause.
"Does it matter?" Lisa said, grabbing my other hand. "I'm just as saved as I would've been if you hadn't hesitated at all."
I didn't know how to reply to that.
She was shaking again, but this time, it was from laughter. "This is the opposite of how it's meant to go, isn't it? Usually, it's the hero comforting the damsel in distress, not the other way around."
"Sorry."
She bumped her shoulder into mine, smiling. I didn't flinch, that time.
"Besides," I said, "you weren't exactly a damsel in distress. You saved my life as much as I saved yours."
She grinned. "I guess you could say I'm a damsel of distress."
"Isn't that the name of a villain near Boston?"
"...Of course it is. There go villains, ruining everything I love," she sighed, falling across my lap with a hand pressed against her forehead.
I couldn't help but smile. She beamed in response.
How had she bounced back so quickly? Was she distracting herself with the conversation? 'Act a certain way long enough and you'll become the mask', or however it went. Fake it 'till the trauma of nearly being mauled by three neo-nazis fades into the background.
"So," I asked, "how did things go with the PRT?"
She straightened up, eyes gleaming. "I got to meet Velocity!" A phone was shoved in my face, and I had to pull back to see the selfie she'd taken with the hero. To my chagrin, she had a normal phone, too, unlike my weird oval one.
…Were photo-Lisa's eyes wetter than they were now? What had happened in that half-hour we were apart? When she was alone, a ten-second sprint from an alley filled with tied-up and probably pissed-off nazis?
"Velocity? What was he like?" I asked instead.
"He was super serious." She leaned in and spoke in a faux whisper, "I think he used to be a secret agent."
Robin Swoyer had been a soldier before he became a hero, right? He'd joined the army to learn languages and travel, and when that didn't work out, he triggered. The Protectorate wasn't much better for him, in that regard. He'd had all of one appearance in canon before he died to Leviathan, so I didn't know much else about him.
He'd been one of the two people I'd considered asking after if I were to call the PRT about my meta-knowledge. Since I knew his full name, it'd be a way to immediately get their attention, moreso than asking for a Hannah or an Ethan.
I did also know Triumph's full name – Rory Christner – but since his father was the local mayor, he'd probably be well-known enough that it wouldn't have the same effect.
Now who was distracting themself from a traumatic experience by thinking about other things?
"You think he's an ex-spy?"
"Nope!" She said, "I just thought it'd be cool."
I snorted.
"Who's your favourite cape?" She asked. "I'll tell you their secret backstory."
"Uh…" Well, I couldn't say Defiant, so, "Armsmaster."
"This is gonna be good," Aeon muttered.
She cleared her throat, and started to talk in a dramatic voice.
"Blair Marsh was the best detective in the business, solving one mystery after another. He joined at the age of ten, and was one of the highest ranking investigators in the country by the time he was 18."
She stood up with one foot on the table, leaning into her phone as if it was a stage mic, with a confidence I wished I could feel.
"On one fateful day, he was given his hardest case yet. A group of hackers were trying to get into White House security, and he was assigned to find their base of operations and stop them once and for all.
"It was a full week before he had his breakthrough, cracking the secret to making his high-tech gadgets. Eleven hours later, Blair stood victorious. The Protectorate knew they needed his skills, so he was promoted to a superhero on the spot. Thus, Detective Marsh faded into the background, and Armsmaster came to the fore!"
I clapped, and she gave a dramatic bow, adding in a disproportionate number of hand-twirlies. As blatantly inaccurate as it was, it was still fun.
"Can you tell I was in Immaculata's drama club before I changed schools?"
"I dunno, I think a real drama club member would've had more hand-twirlies," Aeon said drily.
I relayed its words to her, and she laughed. "I'll do more next time!"
There was a pause.
"Thanks for all of this," I said. Thanks for saving my life. For being actually, truly enthusiastic to talk to me. For being the one person to just be nice to me, no obligations attached. "For trying to cheer me up," I said instead.
"No problem! I like to cheer people up, even if it… doesn't always work. I'd rather be upbeat than be a downer, if I can. Um, no offence!"
"None taken."
Another pause.
"But, um… do you mind if I be a downer for a moment?" She asked.
"Go ahead, I think you've earned it." God knows I was feeling a lot better after this than I would've otherwise.
"It's a weird question, but do you mind if I spend the night at your place?"
I blinked.
"I mean! I don't want to intrude or anything, it's just…" She looked down at her phone. "Dad's great normally, but he's been acting weird recently. Avoiding me. And I don't wanna be alone right now."
Another heat started as I worked through my reply. "We don't really have a spare bed, I think, just a sofa. If you're fine with that…"
Her head bobbed up and down.
"That's fine! Uncomfortable sleep is better than no sleep."
"Cool. I'll have to check with my guardian, make sure he doesn't mind," I said, fishing my phone from my pocket. "It's getting late, so should we get going soon?"
The last of the tension bled out of her. "Let's."
A/N: Realised in editing that I messed up which school Lisa M came to Arcadia from. She's now an ex-Immaculata student.
(Pre-Edit) A/N: Okay so basically, this was going to be the same length as the last three chapters, but it ended up another 1k longer, because, well, yeah.
In other news, I'm aware that 'Brianne runs into a mugging' is both as generic as you can get and is even more contrived than the Panacea thing. However, this is a story, and I felt like this would be the best way to get Brianne a bit of the character development she needed.
Anyway, if people haven't noticed, I've updated my post in the Media threadmarks with a few more images.
One final note, to those who haven't been reading my other posts on the thread, I've realised why most authors don't reply to every comment they get. To avoid getting burned out, I won't be responding to everyone (other than on AO3), though I'll still be reading every comment I get.
4.0040 Mechanic (100 CP) (Fast and Furious) (Vehicles)
Machines, especially ones that go fast, just speak to you. You have no problem fixing up and tuning any motor vehicle, and can rebuild them after the most devastating crashes. You can keep anything in top condition with just a few simple tools. Of course, you also need to understand the electronics, so hotwiring cars (and sometimes, alarm systems) is not a problem either.
The Vehicle (0 CP)
This object barely deserves the title of car, at least in your opinion. A Volkswagen Beetle, a Pinto, or a Yugo, this car technically meets all the criteria and is very cheap, but it would take a master mechanic and a driving god to let it rival even the worst other racers can bring to the table.
And now there's just going to be a random vehicle on (or near) that spaceship. Armsmaster is tearing out his hair at how this 'obviously' civilian car just broke the blockade. Since it's not tinkertech at all. They get it towed, and it shows back up.
That's... kind of the same thing? I suppose with the finer details there would be a distinct difference though. Either way, Aeon would likely not be detectable even still. Other than with how it interacts with things. Actually that might be a way for Armsmaster to detect Stands; see how it interacts with the world physically. And something that Armsmaster would feasibly have in his toolkit. There's already an aerokinetic around the bay. He might have something to highlight whatever force Rune uses for her power as well, though I'd imagine it's not as important for him to develop, compared to everything else. Especially since it'd kind of be obvious, comparatively.
Other than with how it interacts with things. Actually that might be a way for Armsmaster to detect Stands; see how it interacts with the world physically. And something that Armsmaster would feasibly have in his toolkit.
