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C: I think that would be pretty neat.
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Imposter Syndrome [Worm/Celestial Forge SI]
- Thread starter Lazypika
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Apparently rockets work underwater so she probably wouldn't. Gravitational repulsion would still probably work better but it wouldn't be absolutely required.
I think that a decent amount of Tinkers can do that as standard. Semi-autonomous equipment left laying around. It's just that Armsmaster ends up wearing most of his equipment.
Eh. I should think that Extended Warranty would protect it against even gratuitous amounts of regular use but that some sabotage or explosive overclocking would be beyond what it could protect against.
Alternatively if it doesn't then Brianne has some even higher performance equipment then she thinks that she does. Especially since she's got more maintenance Perks now.
Maybe? She should at least make the self-destruct function harder to access then a outright button. Nah, see, the self-destruct button should be a taser or something as dictated by Evil Overlord List Rule Nine.
There are indeed many different flavors of stealth and some of them can be quite loud.
Yeah but she didn't handle importing Companions; she wasn't involved with it at all is what I'm getting at.
Also that was me mocking the character rather then the characterization; the characterization is absolutely on point. Very realistic and engaging; it's just that I can see someone honestly believing that some random-ass environmental factor has any baring on their moral character and/or value as a individual. If anything the fact that I can't see it without saying something about it is a sign that you're doing it well.
Relatedly while Brianne can piss off Amy I can only imagine the sort of weaponized word salad that she'd end up rambling at Victoria in a panicked mess.
I am personally dreading that confrontation but, like, in a good way.
Probably a bit excessive since she can presumably oversee things remotely. Like get some AR stuff with see-through picture-in-picture.
Presumably the white structure is a tissue scaffold and a arbitrary persons cells then colonize it afterwards. Like synthetically made decellularized tissues/organs but a whole prosthetic bodies worth. Several prosthetic bodies even.
Probably best to just have stuff like that be either magic or imported physics or Fiat. Either way it makes getting rid of displaced material from underground basement making even easier the it would be with Miniaturization or Plentamaws.
Oh god damn. Yeah that should work. As long as it could work with regular skeletons rather then animated ones since I don't believe that there's a Doll for them. Bonemeal can be sifted from soil so bones themselves shouldn't be too hard. Assuming that you can put bones back together from bonemeal. Miniaturization, I feel, should be able to sinter them back together or something.
I imagine that Sorting Tasks would have a implication about how storing things might not be a Task but organizing things into storage would be.
Ambiguity? It's not like that'd be too hard to find enough of to prompt a Vote.
That's actually really interesting. Thanks for that.
Also I'm surprised that Armsmaster didn't modify a bike for Assault. It wouldn't be too hard. Just have the pistons hammer right against the seat so that Assault can absorb the impacts and put them right back into the engine.
Given that Endless Space ships are designed for combat I think that they can handle a bit more pressure then usual. Especially with other Perks propping things up.
Eh. That might be a bit too easy.
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
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Z: I don't think releasing a Wither in a populated area is a good idea. The damn thing's like a mini-Endbringer that happens to be killable.
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Not without becoming a companion first. Sans is a companion, but right now, Lisa M is just some chick who's hanging out with a Forger. There's a few ways for her to become a companion, but none of them have been rolled yet.
I mean,
> Also when I say durable, I mean the universe could collapse into nothingness and that device of yours would still be floating in the empty void that used to be said universe.
The perk text makes it sound like it'd be decently durable. Pretty aight there. No big.
Oh okay sweet.
Yeah, she's definitely blaming herself for stuff that isn't her fault. On some level, she knows Sans being 'kidnapped' didn't result from choices she made or anything - it's more along the lines of 'if I didn't exist this wouldn't have happened, therefore I am responsible'.
Unlike Panacea, GG probably wouldn't believe a word of it since Bri wouldn't really have any big secrets on her. Unless she says, idk, "ask Dean about Cauldron", GG would probably just get righteously angry and use her aura or something for daring to talk shit about her sister.
Yeah, with Ex Nihilo, skeleton spawns are one of the things you're meant to rely on Vanilla skyblock progression for. Good thing Brianne now has a dimension ripped right from Minecraft, huh?
She could also get a plastic skeleton and combine it with some bone, making a real one piece by piece.
My point was more that she'd need to be in a situation where exactly two parties were arguing in front of a crowd to use that perk.
Oh god yeah. Objectively terrible idea. I was just suggesting other uses for Witch Water, and summoning the Wither was the most dramatic one I could think of.
If Bri summoned and killed it in a safe place, though, she'd be able to get a nether star, so that's something at least.
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Also, about mods... Some of them need addons to interact with each other. Is this function already included? Like, Bri can and know how to use Ex Nihilo in combination with, I dunno, Thaumcraft? Because Ex Nihilo itself has variety of add-up mods and other things for interact with other modifications via new crafts/mechanics.
P.S. Oh, Chaos, I knew there are many mods... But this looks like there are infinite number of them! Last time I looked It wasn't so much things.
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Then release it into a unpopulated area.
Ah I see. Never mind then.
Bah; humans are shit at fault analysis.
Well there's the nazies she keeps mangling for her own stress relief and yeah her use of her Master effect is probably what would cause the whole problem in the first place.
Relatedly it'd probably be a decent idea to scan her and Deans powers for Master effect emulation and possibly whatever effect allows Amy to analyze and manipulate biological functions.
Ah, right, Plentimaw recombination. A animal skeleton made more human would probably be better then a plastic skeleton made more bone though.
Well that wouldn't be unreasonable to do. Representatives of organizations generally bring backup when they're bullshitting so wait for them to make some objectionable claims that the people they bring with them don't believe even slightly, get someone to call them out, and you've got two disagreeing parties and a crowd of neutral parties.
Having the mods themselves be possible to mess with even without the interaction between it and other Mods would probably be best. Things like being able to Miniaturize a Sieve and still have the functionality of a Ex Nihilo Sieve.
Not with what she has now but definitely later, there are even some perks that optimize your body, so it would eventually go away on its own given enough time.
I kind of love how there are people throwing around ideas for gene therapies and medication that have been done IRL and then there's this one guy who thinks that there's no way that it can be done.
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Yeah, I'd count 'connective tissue' mods as being part of the greater mod purchase. If I'd taken, say, Tinker's Construct instead, I'd allow Bri to be able to smelt basically any metal and a whole lot of non-metals in her smeltery. If/when she gets more mods, I'd give Ex Nihilo the modpack treatment and add the items from the other mod to the 'Ex Nihilo drop tables'.
Good point. Tbf, she mangles nazis because she's pissed off about injustice and how many of them are getting away with stuff, so it's not the 'oh I got a bad grade, time to go kick a dumpster at a nazi' of stress relief.
As for the aura thing, Wildbow deconfirmed it, so I won't be using it. Say what you will about human neurology, even if there's the potential for it to be a factor in things, I'm not going to make it the only factor.
Oh, I'm not saying it'd be unfeasible, not by a long shot. I'm saying it wouldn't be the sort of thing she could just use willy-nilly - it'd require planning.
Oh, yeah, the stuff from the mods would still count as, like, normal crafted items. They'd have actual principals behind how they function and such. Just in the cases of things like Ex Nihilo giving items you'd need for a mod to function (giving vis crystals and silverwood seeds for Thaumcraft, for example) or Tinker's Construct being able to make TiC weapons with unique TiC properties from non-TiC materials.
Does that mean that the Sync mod should interact with the Ex Nihilo mod? Because being able to print Endermen instead of needing to use a whole diamond for a Doll, however easily Brianne might be able to get them, could be decent.
Alternatively being able to quickly make a backup body with a modified Doll would also be interesting. Maybe print a Whither Skeleton? Or possibly modify a backup body with Witch Water or something?
Edit: hang on a moment this gives me a idea: Enderman leather block-placement gloves. Both because Endermen can move blocks and because the Void World mod comes with floating platforms. Maybe something something aligning a distinct Block of exacting size and material with the framework of the universe and having it lock into place, baring sufficient force knock it out of place, like a standing wave upon the universes polarization.
She threw a dumpster, a move that you'd normally reserve for Brutes, at a normie. Regardless of whether it was a impulse move that's goodn't; it puts her right up there with drunk drivers who disregard their drunk selves endangerment of others and get drunk anyway. It's not like it was the first time that she did it either; Amy was resigned/exasperated in that scene rather then anything like surprised.
I'd recommend taking WoG as first-and-a-half order Canon; Canon only when not contradicted by narration but overriding any other works even if officially endorsed.
Also upon reading your post again I see that I might have miscommunicated/misunderstood; to clarify I mean that GGs aura would probably be what would make Brianne ramble in the first place.
Ah I see; she'd need to bring in a consultant.
Edit: it occurs to me that Brianne could probably use this sub-Perk to help form a team pretty well. Or at least clear up internal disputes within one and enforce precommitments to them.
I'd personally not grant functionality granting materials alongside the Perk that requires them; a Forge user should get creative in a situation like that~
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I'm treating Minecraft mods like they'd be treated in a real modpack. If Ex Nihilo is in a modpack, it'd probably be in a Skyblock pack, so it'd be there to give the player the materials they wouldn't be able to find since they're not in the overworld. Modded materials are usually added to Ex Nihilo roll tables. Modpacks with Tinkers Construct in them more often than not add something like PlusTiC to add compatibility with modded materials.
There's nothing like that for Sync. If Sync was in a modpack, it'd probably be to give hardcore players a way to get extra lives, or maybe as discount teleportation or something. There's other mods (and other perks in the CF) to spawn mobs with. If Bri gets more biology perks, she could set something like that up, but right now, she wouldn't know how.
Oh, I'm not trying to justify what she did, and I'm not trying to say that she hadn't done it multiple times. I was just clarifying her motive.
Don't worry, that's how I'm taking WoG. Even Wildbow says not to take WoG as fact, since he might come up with a better idea and put that into canon instead. I like to treat WoG as filling in details where it doesn't contradict canon.
If I recall, Aura Theory was suggested in WoG and then disproven in Ward when too many people were victim-blaming Vic for being assaulted. I haven't read up to that point of Ward, but I believe it's in one of the Panacea interludes, where she's talking to Ms Yamada, and Yamada points out that if the aura thing was real, then the rest of New Wave would show symptoms, too.
Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
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Honestly, I wish they had highlighted in both Worm and Ward that the whole thing was basically Carol's fault more than it was Victoria's instead of focusing so much on the Aura thing. Amy was emotionally dependent on Vicky because literally, nobody else in the entire family was supportive of her at all. Carol also led Amy to believe that she was secretly such a monster that nobody else would really love her for who she was, etc. Carol was emotionally abusive by withdrawing all forms of affection away from Amy. Victoria was basically the only one who showed her any affection.
I can see how this could lead to "Only Vicky loves me for who I really am. My biological makeup confuses this feeling of emotional dependency with real love and lust. I need her emotionally so much that I assume that I'm deeply in love with her as more than just a sister!"
and now every fix-it fanfic addresses the Aura thing while completely forgetting about Carol.... acting as if they fix the Aura, that it'd fix everything else.
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I have come here to leak my Bad Ideas like a reactor can leak radiation. Behold!
Edit: actually there are apparently some add-on mods for Ex Nihilo as well so I guess I'm kind'a just asking how you're handling those in general.
She'd probably try to resolve that by mentally unpersoning Amy though. Especially if she hadn't been satisfying her Shard lately. The brat.
Okay, alright, I think that I follow. As a extension of this I have to ask whether other Tinkers, like Blasto for instance or possibly Particulate, would be able to repurpose a, for a lack of a better word, clone manufacturer (because it really doesn't seem to be a clone grower) and also have to inform you that there's a recursive mod for Thaumcraft with a similar concept to the Sync mod.
Edit: actually there are apparently some add-on mods for Ex Nihilo as well so I guess I'm kind'a just asking how you're handling those in general.
Well that'd have to be her motivation in your story because in Worm Canon she threw a man a couple dozen feet down the road when she terrifying him didn't stop him from calling her a cunt and then kicked a dumpster at him. Nothing about injustice involved in it.
Well, I mean, not to seem biased or anything but One of the parents was Golden Childing Victoria and the other was had crippling depression. Those could both be interpreted as the same symptoms manifesting differently because neurology-based-behaviors are tricky like that.
It only just occurred that Amy probably developed the shame/pride-equivalent of Learned Helplessness, being given little-to-no reason not to be monstrous at the slightest prompting and mostly staying averse to it out of spite, from Carol...It also just occurred to me how horrified Carol, given her Trigger and the usual reasons for inducing Learned Helplessness someone, probably would be at having done that to another person.
She'd probably try to resolve that by mentally unpersoning Amy though. Especially if she hadn't been satisfying her Shard lately. The brat.
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In the case of recursive mods, I'd essentially be adding any stuff from them that adds cross compatibility and only cross compatibility. No new functionality. For Thaumic Horizons, the Soul Beacon etc are completely new blocks/items that expands on Thaumcraft, so even if Bri had both Sync and Thaumcraft, she wouldn't be able to make them.
In the case of Ex Nihilo mods, I'd take things like 'New drops available from sieving and hammering items', 'Natural items from the mods are now able to be composted', etc, but I wouldn't take 'A new way to get to the end - make enderpearl blocks from 4 enderpearls, and make an endercake from 6 enderpearl blocks, 2 vanilla cakes, and 1 notch apple. Right-click this with an eye of ender to "feed the cake in order to charge it for travel".' or Ex Compressium's Compressed Hammers.
If it works entirely within the mod's mechanics and serves only to make two mods work together, it's fine. Things like Redstone Flux, Crystal Flux, Energy Units, Joules, etc. that are all under the umbrella of Forge Energy (the Forge modloader's generic electricity API) will be interchangeable - Bri could power an Immersive Engineering machine with an Ender IO generator, even if the former technically uses Immersive Flux energy and the latter uses Micro Infinity energy.
On the other hand, using, say, Botania Mana to power an Immersive Engineering machine won't work, since it's not under the Forge Energy umbrella. If there was a hypothetical magic/magitech mod that used Forge Energy under the name mana, it would be compatible, since it'd be compatible in-game.
If there was a hypothetical mod that added, say, chalk ritual circles to Ex Nihilo to summon Twilight Forest bosses, I probably wouldn't include it if Bri had both Ex Nihilo and Twilight Forest, since chalk ritual circles don't exist in either of the parent mods, so they'd count as 'new functionality'. If that mod did the exact same thing but with dolls, however, I'd count it, since it's using a function Ex Nihilo already has.
I'm going based on a quote from Ward. I can't remember which chapter it's from, and I only have a .txt file of Worm to do quick searches in, no Ward or WoG thread. This post by Ridtom was the best I could find, but they didn't cite any exact chapters or quotes.
She was definitely too brutal in how she treated civilians, I'm not trying to deny that. (Admittedly, that 'civilian' was a dickwad racist nazi who assaulted a black woman so harshly she needed to be sent to the hospital, so I'm not exactly cut up about it.) I was just trying to point out that she had motives beyond 'ugh, I'm feeling down, time to kick a dumpster at someone'.
In the end, it's just far more interesting to me for New Wave's issues to be the result of mundane trauma and poor mental health and such than 'hurr durr Glory Girl bad aura caused Everything and is also the anti-christ' (which I realise nobody here was saying, but other people have said it in other places). If her aura had an effect, it's just far more interesting for it to have been one of many exacerbating factors in issues that were already there rather than the singular factor that Fucked Everything Up.
If other people have different interpretations, that's perfectly fine. Fiction is meant to be interpreted differently by different people. But, Wildbow has gone on record to disprove aura theory, and it'd feel disingenuous to the wonderfully complex characters and relationships he made to just make the problem completely one-dimensional.
(If anyone reads this and gets ready to start talking shit about Wildbow, that's your valid interpretation and reaction to both him and Worm as a whole. I'm writing Wormfic because I personally love the stuff he's written, but unless you try to convince me to hate him, you're entitled to whatever opinion you want. If, hypothetical Wildbow hater, you do try to convince me that Wildbow is actually a worse writer than Tara Gilesbie, you'd BETTER have citations on every single detail.)
(Okay wow I got derailed lmao. I'll stop talking.)
Edit: Goddamnit I'm continuing to talk.
Something interesting I heard pointed out recently about Vic and Carol is that Carol was one of the bigger factors, if not the biggest factor, in the events that led up to Vic being put in the mental state where she triggered.
As much as people make fun of Vic triggering over someone cheating in a basketball game, even though she's a second gen cape and had a lower threshold for triggering, she actually triggered due to a variety of stresses and more mental factors that just all came to a head during the basketball game.
Her parents were ignoring her, unimportant unpowered Victoria, even though they were right there in the bleachers and there to be watching her in the first place. Someone on the enemy team was cheating and nobody was calling them out, iirc, and if there's one thing Vic despises, it's injustices going unpunished.
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the mana fluxfield isn't that hard to craft, it's just not generally used because most mods that use RF have a better way to generate it.
at the risk of getting derailed further into the minutia of minecraft mods, some of the traits in PlusTIC or whatever it's called now are really weirdly balanced, but on the other hand it'd be weird not to be able to make tools out of those materials at all.
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I really liked the SI right away - being capable of performing basic science like measuring the timings of her power instantly puts her ahead of most. It helps that we're shown a lot of her mental processes, and they are actually ways that a sane person would think in.
Electric Aeon is quite an interesting character too - Brianne really needed someone to talk to her and give her basic advice. I'm somewhat sad that she didn't end up listening to him much later on (e.g. in the Lisa encounter), and now it seems he's been partially replaced with Lisa in that role.
Getting Endless Space as her first tinker power is quite a roll. It's hilarious that due to it being a 100pt perk, it's a pretty weak power - because in general, Endless Space is an incredibly high-tech setting. One of the most basic features of the setting, Dust, is a substance made of self-reproducing ancient attomachines seeded around the galaxy by a civilization that ended up going virtual. The tech tree in the game starts with stuff like artifically created superheavy isotopes and electron-degenerate matter and goes up from there.
Also, it's a bit strange to me that so far, Pose and Poise didn't have a noticeable effect. In BBCF, presentation powers running wild was one of the most notable things about Apeiron, yet it seems this one didn't affect how Brianne acts at all, in her civilian and cape lives alike.
Electric Aeon is quite an interesting character too - Brianne really needed someone to talk to her and give her basic advice. I'm somewhat sad that she didn't end up listening to him much later on (e.g. in the Lisa encounter), and now it seems he's been partially replaced with Lisa in that role.
Getting Endless Space as her first tinker power is quite a roll. It's hilarious that due to it being a 100pt perk, it's a pretty weak power - because in general, Endless Space is an incredibly high-tech setting. One of the most basic features of the setting, Dust, is a substance made of self-reproducing ancient attomachines seeded around the galaxy by a civilization that ended up going virtual. The tech tree in the game starts with stuff like artifically created superheavy isotopes and electron-degenerate matter and goes up from there.
Also, it's a bit strange to me that so far, Pose and Poise didn't have a noticeable effect. In BBCF, presentation powers running wild was one of the most notable things about Apeiron, yet it seems this one didn't affect how Brianne acts at all, in her civilian and cape lives alike.
Unfortunately, I doubt much could be done in the Tech Tree until Soma the Sophon, or another Endless Space Perk, shows up. I see no perks from the other Endless Space Jump, so no freebie full Tech Tree that way.
On the Topic of Endless Space, I wonder what model of scout it is since there's thirteen different available possibilities with decent differences.
Drop-In: Jack of All, Master of None Ship
Amoeba: High Defense and Comfort
Automaton: Slowly repairs itself over time
Craver: Biomechanical with biomechanical attack and resource collection drones
disHArmony: NO Life Support or crew amenities, but this agile living crystal ship does more and takes less energy damage
Hisso: Somehow has a wing of Fighter Craft in a hangar in it
Horatio: Flimsy hull, Strong Shields, and best amenities
Pilgrims: Has a small group of pilgrims and the foundation for a settlement
Sheredyn: Sacrifices comfort for firepower
Sophons: Sacrifices half their weaponry to be mobile research labs
Sowers: Giant Sower. No Amenities, no life support, but plenty of storage space
United Empire: Slightly more comfortable than Sheredyn, but focuses strongly on defense
Vaulters: Has a small group of skilled combatants, especially for boarding and counter-boarding.
Amoeba: High Defense and Comfort
Automaton: Slowly repairs itself over time
Craver: Biomechanical with biomechanical attack and resource collection drones
disHArmony: NO Life Support or crew amenities, but this agile living crystal ship does more and takes less energy damage
Hisso: Somehow has a wing of Fighter Craft in a hangar in it
Horatio: Flimsy hull, Strong Shields, and best amenities
Pilgrims: Has a small group of pilgrims and the foundation for a settlement
Sheredyn: Sacrifices comfort for firepower
Sophons: Sacrifices half their weaponry to be mobile research labs
Sowers: Giant Sower. No Amenities, no life support, but plenty of storage space
United Empire: Slightly more comfortable than Sheredyn, but focuses strongly on defense
Vaulters: Has a small group of skilled combatants, especially for boarding and counter-boarding.
My guess is that she's unconsciously suppressing it, because hasn't she been trying to avoid doing anything unusual?
Eh. Using one energy source to produce another is so common that I'd think that you wouldn't even need to make the Perks themselves adapt to eachother. Fuel's fuel.
In fact I'd think that it should be reasonable, though not necessary if you don't feel like depicting it that way, to develop additional functionality, possibly ones inspired from a Doylist angle by the add-on Mods for a given Mod, for any mod-provided equipment given time and ability to develop them. Different meshes or frames for the Sieves or modifying Clay Dolls and Witch Water composition for modified outputs for instance.
Relatedly have you seen the scraping surfaces used in tunnel boring equipment? Because I can't help but think that a Ex Nihilo Sieve could be attached to that pretty easily. It'd be a utilization of them rather then a modification of them though so that would presumably be the case regardless.
Actually I kind of have to wonder about Sieving water as well. There's another Mod and a few mod-packs that adds it to Ex Nihilo but it seems like it could be figured out without one as well depending on how flexible the Perk allows them to be. Maybe not to produce fish like the add-on Mod does but there are other things in the water. For that matter some Sieve-based air-filters might be decent as well.
Edit: thinking about it the Ex Nihilo hammers would probably be pretty decent for mining as well. They're durable, more durable then they should be for their composition I would think, and presumably contain their damage to a square meter of material. Presumably even in cases where it shouldn't propagate even that far.
Thinking about it that would probably make them useful for grinding other things. Coffee comes to mind.
It might also be possible to arrange a exchange between herself and Particulate. She'd probably be interested in buying a few Hammers.
Actually come to think of it there's another function of them that would probably be useful. Not all powders make clay but power in a Ex Nihilo Barrel produces clay. That and cobblestone doesn't normally turn into sand which is form of silicate. Ex Nihilo Hammers are probably a bit weird even outside of their durability.
She went from worrying that she'd killed a man to kicking a dumpster at them and going right back to worrying about having killed him again. She might have principles and she might have potential but she's not quite there yet.
Yeah Amy got put into such a perfect storm of psychological malformation that I'm surprised that her identity and powers didn't end up warped a la Mannequin at some point. It doesn't even happen in any Fics that I've seen.
Of course going in the opposite direction and acting like there was no effect from it what-so-ever also seems disingenuous.
Ummm...You might want to take a look at Wildbows Quest before basing a opinion on him solely off of Worm. Like I'm not going to tell you which opinion to have but I am going to tell you to increase you sample size before determining anything.
Not...Entirely sure that that's the conclusion that follows from a hybrid Master/Brute/possibly Shaker Trigger but something like it yeah. Like hating injustice/corruption seems like either it follows from or is encompassed by what bothered her enough to Trigger from.
Like it might just be me being biased but she seems like her Trigger would emphasize the Shaker aspect of her powers if it was so impersonal rather then just a hatred of injustice and familial/social exclusion in general.
In fact I believe that a Trigger over general injustice/corruption of her social environment would, as long as it wasn't exclusionary enough to her personally to result in a Master Trigger, manifest as a Tinker power of all things which actually seems like it would be rather interesting.
Well I don't know about heavy atoms and isotopes themselves just yet but I wouldn't be surprised if Miniaturization Tinkering allowed for atoms themselves to be condensed or compressed in ways that they would normally not be.
Artificially super-heavy elements and isotopes would probably be good for energy storage though.
Edit: a thought occurs. Would unstable elements/isotopes made by Brianne decay or would her maintenance necessity removal Perk prevent that? I bring this up because Brianne could totally make a fusion-based nuclear enrichment device and it'd probably be easier to use fission for energy then fusion.
Edit: it occurs to me that Brianne will have to either keep a bunch of clothing near her clone printers or, and this is a possibility I'm liking the thought of, make a automatic clothing maker. Really I can see Lisa liking that as well. Especially with Workaholic producing copies for them. Either that or making some mini-clothing out of micro-fibers and enlarging it. That'd probably be better from a logistical and convenience standpoint anyway.
Either way custom clothing. Nice.
Edit: unrelatedly; egg. Specifically egg + balloon = massive egg with flexible shell. Lots of omelet there.
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Imposter Syndrome - Orientation 1.x (Interlude; The Man Who Would Be King)
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A/N: This is an edited version of Chapter 10 Orientation 1.x. Ch1-10 have been edited, anything beyond that is being rewritten.
OriginalChapter 10 Orientation 1.x below:
This was a mistake. Why had he come here?
The sound of murmuring rose as the service ended and people filed out in groups of two or three. He was one of the first to leave, quietly slipping through the doors to head to the parking lot.
How many years had it been since he'd last been in a church? His mother's funeral had been… '09? So, two years, give or take a few months.
He had nearly skipped that one too.
Out of the crowd, he was the only one who hadn't brought a car for the procession. All he had was his personal motorbike. It was sturdy and reliable, even if it had accumulated damage over the years. Eventually it'd be replaced by a newer model, but for now, it was his.
The procession stopped. There were very few parking spots left, but after a few circles of the area, he found one between two wider cars that he could fit in. He flipped the bike's kickstand and walked to where the rest of the group had gathered.
There was someone wailing near the head of the group. He grimaced. There were other people who could deal with her better than he could, at least right at that moment–he was going to be doing what he could to assist later.
It didn't make the horrible feeling of helplessness sting less.
A creaking sound approached him, and he turned. James–a different James from the one being rolled out of the hearse–wheeled up to him.
"James. It's been a while," he said in lieu of a greeting.
The other man gave a pained smile. "It's been a long time since you last called me 'Dad'."
"We're both adults, now," he replied. "If you wanted to be my father, you should've started when I was ten years old, alone at home, with nobody to talk to but my journal."
James looked away, the remnants of the attempted smile dropping from his face. "You're making the same mistakes I did, though, aren't you? You're, what, thirty-four now? And you already have white hairs growing in."
"Thirty-five," he corrected, "and putting my job first is part of the reason I didn't try to start a family."
Were those tears glistening in James' eyes? He turned away to let the man preserve some dignity.
"At least if you did," James said, "when you're a broken-down old man like me, you'd have a child to talk to."
"And that child would be just as distant from me as I am from you," he replied.
James sighed, and his wheelchair creaked as he leaned back in it. "I'm guessing that this is absolutely vital work that you can't ease up on without serious consequences?" Rhetorical question. Even if the other man didn't know his son, he knew himself, and he knew the traits he would've passed down.
"I'm an investigator and Watchdog liaison for the PRT." Lie. He'd wanted a cover as a PRT technician, but he'd done a criminal psychology degree, not an engineering one.
James just sighed again, sounding as tired as he felt.
"If I slacked off, people would die. Innocent people." Truth. Every hour he didn't spend at work was one more possible tragedy he could've prevented, one more horrible aftermath he'd have to stand in the wake of, unable to do a goddamn thing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw James rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "And one day, Colin, you'll be-"
"-A broken-down old man like you," he interrupted, "but at least I'd be a broken-down old man in a slightly better world." More lies. Even if he somehow survived to be an old man, there wasn't some mythical point where the monsters would stop attacking, where everything would reach a peaceful utopia and all the world's problems would be fixed.
James just shook his head, silent.
The distant sobbing turned to shrieking, and James twitched as the girl cried out for the boy who'd been named after him. "That poor young lady," he muttered. "Her whole family…"
Killed by a villain.
Echolalia, who'd traveled to Boston from Brockton Bay only months before. A petty thief.
He couldn't have known to do anything. Her group hadn't been killers. Prioritizing attacks on the Empire 88 had been the logical move.
This was one of the other reasons he hadn't bothered trying to start a family. Easier to stay objective about things, this way. Less to use against him.
The crowd undulated as several people pulled a screaming, thrashing girl back from where the coffins were being lowered into the ground. It took several minutes for her shouting to break back down into weeping.
This was a mistake. He shouldn't have come here. He couldn't be the one who dealt with this. All he'd do was hurt her more.
But he was going to have to be. Even if James–the girl's uncle–had been in a position to take care of a child, he didn't think he'd have a choice then, either.
Too many times, he'd been stuck in the fallout of a catastrophe, the inability to help burning him from the inside out.
He'd be damned if he was going to let it happen again.
He'd had doubts since the moment he'd made his decision, and the look on the social worker's–Mary Silver's–face was only making them stronger.
"I do wish there was someone better for this, but…" she trailed off.
"I know that I'm far from an ideal caregiver, but I'm both her closest able-bodied relative and the one who lives nearest to her. Besides, with her 18th birthday so soon, she wouldn't need to stay with me for very long."
The girl's parents had left her both their house and enough money to live on for a few years, so he'd hardly be throwing her in the deep end when she moved out again. He'd been able to make do with less.
"If she enrolls in a new school in Brockton Bay to finish her education-"
"-Then I'd be able to house her until the end of the school year."
Her face grew a little sadder. "Please, don't look at this like a puzzle to be solved. Ms Steele is a child, a grieving one. She doesn't just need a place to stay, she needs support, someone who can help her through these difficult times."
"Like you said, there's no better option. With her outbursts, she can't stay with James Wallis, and you said yourself that she'd do poorly in foster care. It's only a small improvement, but it's the best we're going to get."
He knew the benefits of small improvements better than anyone. Of facing down an insurmountable enemy and being just a little bit faster, having gear that's just a little bit better than it could've been.
"I know, I know, but…" Ms Silver rubbed one temple. "I just fear for Brianne's wellbeing."
"So do I," he said. He also knew better than anyone that he'd make a poor parental figure.
She sighed and stood up. "I suppose you'd better get the chance to speak to her."
He stood too and followed her through the building's unfamiliar halls.
Brianne Steele swiped an arm across her eyes as they walked into the room. It didn't hide the fact that her face was blotchy, or the fact that the hand holding her phone was shaking.
"Miss Steele," Ms Silver said gently, "this is Mr Wallis. He's going to be your caregiver for the next few months."
Brianne glared up at him, and he met her eyes. After several seconds, she looked away again.
"I can't say that I'll be as supportive as others might've been," he said, "but I can give you a place to stay until you're ready to move out on your own."
More time passed, half a minute or so, before she gave a tight nod.
Hannah had been kind enough to help him set up the spare room in his apartment for Brianne's use. He'd moved his boxes into his own bedroom and set up some flat-packed furniture in the ex-storage room.
He adjusted his backpack as Brianne looked around the room.
"It's small," she said.
"It's what I have."
She grit her teeth and started to unpack her belongings.
It was clear that she wasn't happy with the situation. That was a no-brainer. If Hannah were still over, would she be able to cheer the girl up? Maybe, maybe not. Point was, he certainly didn't know how, not when she was in such a delicate state.
Brianne fumbled with her computer, trying to get everything plugged in to the right places.
"Need any help with that?" He asked. If nothing else, tech was something he knew.
"No. Go away," she snapped.
"Fine," he said, walking out of the room.
"And don't come back! I don't want to fucking be here, and the less I have to see your stupid face, the better!" She yelled after him.
"You'd prefer to be in foster care?" He asked. There was no response. "If you don't want me around, fine. I've been over the laws surrounding this, and while I'll need to be present most days, I'll be leaving early and coming home late."
"I'll make sure to sleep in, then," she said.
"That's fine." So long as he still met the legal requirements, he'd try to give her space.
In fact, that was a relief. He didn't have to make anything more than minor changes in his schedule, so there'd be much less risk of a crisis starting while he was occupied with her. Best of both worlds - the trolley had been moved onto a third track, so to speak.
"I-"
He turned back to Brianne, who'd taken a step towards him. "Hm? Do you need something?"
Her eyes narrowed and she turned away. "I need you to leave."
"I am."
He left the apartment, feeling Brianne's gaze on his back. The backpack was left unopened, until he arrived back at the PHQ and put the helmet inside back on its armor stand.
Even if she hadn't been so hostile, telling her about his other identity would've been a bad idea, anyway. Her family had been killed by a Tinker, and she'd probably blame him for not stopping the villain as much as he blamed himself.
Colin balled up the plastic bags and dropped them in the trash.
"You're not keeping those?" Brianne needled.
"Why would I?" He asked. "There's no reason to have them take up space just on the off chance I'll need them."
"Come on, what kind of an adult are you if you don't have a plastic bag filled with other plastic bags? My parents had, like, three of those things."
"I'm not your parents. I don't like to hang onto things I don't need anymore."
"You aren't my parents," she snarled, "because my parents would've at least tried to sympathize, or give me some support, or something."
This was going to go swimmingly, he was sure.
"If you wanted support, why didn't you just ask?" Not that he would've been any good at giving it, but he could've tried.
"Fucking when? You're never around!"
"At your request," he ground out. "You were the one who asked me to go away, remember?"
She set her jaw and looked away.
When she didn't reply, he took a breath and continued. "You're being irrational. You're expecting one thing while asking for another."
"Well- I- I'm allowed to be irrational! I'm allowed to want my family to not be fucking dead!"
"And that won't be allowed forever," he said. "It was a terrible thing that happened, but you're going to have to get over it eventually. You don't need your parents to become someone worthwhile."
Wrong thing to say.
Brianne's eyes went wild with fury, and she charged at him, screaming something unintelligible. As dour as the thought was, at least he knew how to deal with this. He dodged her first wild swing and caught her arm, pushing her onto the ground in an armlock.
"I would recommend not doing that again," he snapped. "Right now, my patience is wearing thin. I'm doing you a favor by letting you stay here. Don't squander it."
No. He should at least try to be the bigger person here. He stood up, and she shot to the other side of the room, breathing hard.
"Do you want me to stay or leave?" He asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
"Fuck off," she panted.
"And you do mean it this time?"
"I mean it! Fuck off!"
He did.
One of the neighbors, who'd heard the shouting, was standing outside. A brief explanation of the situation made the man leave, shooting one last worried look towards his apartment. He felt the same, if for different reasons.
He shouldn't have done this, and now, it was too late to go back on it.
Dragon tapped her chin. "It sounds like you tried to approach things from a more logical point of view when what she needed was an emotional one."
"Everything I said was true," he spoke around the wrench in his mouth as he screwed the last panel back into place. "You think I should've lied to her?"
"I think you should've approached things more softly," she said. "From what I can tell, she was too proud to admit to a stranger that she did actually want someone to comfort her. You barged right through that, hit her directly in the dignity."
If she didn't want me to do that, she should've used a more logical argument, he didn't say. Even he knew that wouldn't go over well.
"You can't relate to that at all?" She asked.
He put down his screwdriver, pulled the wrench from his mouth, and carefully started tightening the bolts. "That's different. She's a woman, she's allowed to be vulnerable."
"Colin! That's-" Dragon took a breath. "...Something we'll talk about later. We're talking about your cousin, right now."
"What? It's what society expects of-"
"Later."
He sighed. 'Later' wasn't going to be a fun conversation to have.
"Does she have any friends at school?" Dragon asked.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've tried to be hands-off, like she asked. I didn't want to pry when she clearly didn't- when she didn't seem to want to talk to me."
"So, in the worst-case scenario, she has no support system at all, right now. She tried reaching out to you to get what she was missing, and you rebuffed her."
"Not on purpose. She-"
"-hadn't communicated her issues well enough, I know. But, from her perspective, she tried to reach out, and you rejected it."
Hell of a way to 'reach out'. He didn't say that one, either.
"What should I do, then?" He asked instead.
"You know I'm not exactly a people-person either. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this."
He looked over his halberd. Everything seemed to be in order there, at least, so he put it back on the rack with the others. Dragon gave him a look when he swept his tools onto the floor and kicked his feet up on his workbench.
"I'd be surprised if you were a people-person–you wouldn't exactly have much experience talking to people in person."
He regretted saying that even before she gave an awkward half-smile.
"Geez, I'm sorry," he muttered. Good job, Colin.
"It's fine, really," she said, not that it made things fine.
"Either way," he said, pulling away from that topic, "I trust your judgment. It'd take a lot to be worse than I am at interpersonal stuff."
She snorted.
"Well," she said, "I think you should just try to follow her lead on this. If she doesn't want to bring the argument up, don't bring it up. If she does, apologize. Try to sympathize with her."
"Trying to follow her lead is what got me into this situation."
"See what I mean about not being a people person?" Dragon joked.
"Well, it's better than whatever I would've come up with."
There was a lull in the conversation.
"So," Dragon spoke up, "how is that nanobranch disintegration technology coming along?"
"Well, I've been having a bit of an issue with…"
Brianne flinched when he entered the kitchen, which was an excellent sign about how this was going to go.
"Morning," he said.
Her replying "Morning" was flat, emotionless, a stark contrast to the anger that had been simmering under the surface every time he'd seen her previously.
"You planning to put away the shopping?" He asked after a moment. Stupid question, of course she was. Why else would she be putting away the shopping as they spoke?
"Mm."
As he spoke, at least.
What should he say, though? What could he say that wouldn't make things worse?
"You have any homework to do?" He tried.
She shook her head and got back to sorting out the groceries. With no better ideas, he just watched her from the kitchen doorway. She didn't seem to want to broach the topic of the argument, so he didn't either.
Brianne turned to the refrigerator to put the carrots in the vegetable drawer. Her face looked oddly red. Was she embarrassed? Probably not that - she seemed more jumpy, if anything.
"Everything alright?" He asked. "You look a bit flushed."
"'M fine," she muttered.
Was she sick? He touched a hand to her forehead. Warm, much warmer than regular body heat.
She flinched away from him. Did she think he was going to fight her again? He'd only done that because she'd tried to attack him first. All he'd done was de-escalate.
"Brianne, you're feverish," he clarified. "Did you catch something?"
Finally, she turned to look at him, staring at his face for several seconds. Assessing him to see if he was a threat? Her expression, like her voice, was deliberately flat. The glimmer of fear in her eyes was still obvious.
"Do you have any other symptoms?" He added.
"Tiredness?" Her voice came out as a question rather than a statement, like she was asking even herself if it was true.
Something had happened, whether it was the argument or whatever was going on with her at school. Something had happened, and now, she was acting differently. Acting scared, as if she was expecting to have to bolt at any moment.
Why had she reacted like that? What could've caused-
He remembered the helmet he'd neglected to show her, the explanation he'd been planning to give about serial powers and second generation capes.
…Oh.
Shit.
And if the argument–if he–had been the one to cause it…
"I see," he said, his throat dry. "In that case, get some bed rest, and I'll check back on you tomorrow." Ideally, she'd take the concern as proof he wasn't planning to restart the argument.
As for the day-long break… he needed time to think. Research. He still had access to those Parahuman Studies PDFs, didn't he?
"Thanks," she murmured, relieved. Good, things were going… not as poorly as they could've been.
This had all been a terrible idea.
If his fears were right, then there was a very real chance of her going out to pick a fight, whether as a hero or as...
Or to scavenge for parts, if she'd gotten a variation of his power.
"Thank me by looking after yourself," he said.
Should he call her out? His guess might not even be correct. She hadn't been checked for a corona pollentia–as notoriously difficult as it was to tell the difference between an active one and an inactive one with regular technology, it'd be important to know if she even just had the potential to trigger. Hell, she'd only lived with him for a couple of months, and they'd only interacted for a sum total of a few hours, maybe. This was all just conjecture.
He'd keep it vague, then–she was definitely using the tiredness as an excuse for something, so he could work with that.
"And," he said, "if you want to tell me what's actually going on, I'd be ready to hear you out."
She went still. Bullseye, it seemed.
There wasn't anything he could think of saying that he didn't suspect wouldn't make things worse, so he just walked out of the room, a storm of worries spinning through his mind.
He'd been planning to relax over the weekend. Give his body time to recover, catch up on the shows he hadn't had time to watch during the past few weeks. The city's villain elements had been in a lull of activity, so it was time he could afford himself.
With the realization that he could've been a major factor in a trigger event… There wasn't much he could do other than throw himself into his work, let the altered state of mind his power brought distract him from his worries.
Procrastination through Tinker stuff. At least it was a productive sort of procrastination, as much of an oxymoron as that was.
Dragon had been disappointed that their plans to watch the latest episode of C.R.U.X together had fallen through, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her why.
It had just been the practical decision to make, not telling her. If it came out that he had contributed to a new cape's trigger event, that would be disastrous for him. That's why he didn't say anything.
(If there had been a tightness in his chest at the thought of admitting it to her, it was just because of the potential PR trouble. That was all.)
Even after losing track of time and spending the entire night working, the next day came all too soon.
Despite the fact he'd trained himself to push past his hesitation a long time ago, combat was a whole different ball game compared to social interaction. Still, he turned the key and walked into the apartment after only a short pause.
Brianne was as jumpy as she had been the previous day. She'd frozen when he'd taken her temperature, and she'd kept her distance from him as much as she'd been able to without making it obvious. He'd let her move away–experience and PR seminars had taught him that he shouldn't crowd her if she was feeling distressed or threatened.
He hadn't apologized yesterday, and he regretted letting it slip his mind. Should he do it now? Save it until she seemed ready to talk about it? It's not like he knew what 'seemed ready to talk about it' would even look like. Right now would have to do.
He'd have to be careful about this. Charging straight ahead without putting more than a moment's thought into what he was saying wasn't going to work out.
Best to start simple.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She blinked. It seemed she hadn't expected him to apologize.
When it became apparent that she didn't have anything to say, he continued. "I've been thinking about what I said last week. While I still stand by the points I made, I worded them poorly, and some of the things I said weren't necessary at all."
There. That was the truth. No excuses or justifications.
Brianne stared at the floor, chewing over her words. She eventually settled on mumbling "S'fine. Rather not think about it."
Fuck.
Fifteen years ago, he hadn't wanted to think about things, either.
(He still didn't.)
There was a chance this was confirmation bias. Trauma was hardly exclusive to capes, no matter how much it felt like it with the company he tended to keep. Still, with that chance becoming slimmer and slimmer, he wasn't going to risk that.
"If what we said was so bad to you that you can't even think about it a week later, then it's exactly the sort of thing I'm worried about."
She winced, still not meeting his eyes. What had he done? Was it the tone? He thought he was trying to express sympathy, show that he'd been worried for her. Had that not come across, or did she just not want it?
Did she think he was lying?
Damnation. This was why he tried to avoid this sort of situation.
She shook her head. "Save it?" She asked, with a horrible pleading tone that made him want to leave the apartment and bury himself in Tinker work again.
But, she was trying to put things off. To avoid explaining. That meant she had something to hide. If that something was a power, then the chance she'd run off to start using it was very, very high.
If everything went well, she'd join the Wards, and she'd get the backup she'd need to avoid making a stupid mistake and getting killed. Or, Protectorate, rather–her 18th birthday was in less than two months.
Things weren't going well, though.
The helmet in his backpack felt like a ball of lead.
He'd save the explanation for later.
"On one condition. Don't put yourself in danger." It was the best he was going to get.
"...I won't."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
Good. There was no guarantee she'd keep her word, of course, but it was better than nothing.
"Just…" he said, then stopped. He'd have to think through his words carefully, here. Dragon had advised him to sympathize with her. He could do that, or at least try.
What would he have wanted to hear, fifteen years ago?
"Things get better," he said, "even if it doesn't feel like it. I was never particularly close with my own parents, so I don't know what it's like, but I think I know enough to get a general picture."
Finally, she looked up at him, attentive. She was listening. Did that make it better or worse?
"It's not easy," he continued, "but you find ways to get away from it. Ways to become the sort of person that'll never be in a situation like that again."
In a way, she had it easier than him. Echolalia was in prison and, if she ever broke out again, Brianne could legally beat the shit out of her.
Not that he'd say that to her in those words, of course.
For the first time since he saw her at the funeral, she smiled. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
Good. Good. Things hadn't gone south. If she'd come out of this resenting him, her living in his house would be the least of his worries.
Things moved to less dangerous topics from there and, soon, he was out the door. His backpack, once again, hadn't been opened until he was back in his workshop.
Colin stared at his reflection, sweat dripping down his brow. Not out of vanity, even if he knew he was conventionally attractive enough for an outsider to make that mistake.
There was more gray in his hair than he remembered. While he had a bottle of hair dye for his beard, he'd never bothered to use it anywhere else. No point, really, with how few people would be seeing it.
Graying generally started in a person's thirties, but not to that degree. Was it just stress, or was there a genetic component? Knowing his parents, he could hardly use them as a control group, either.
Scars, too, were something he'd accumulated over time. He could see half a dozen of them and, if he turned around, he'd see a dozen more.
The one curving down from behind his ear was from his early days, before he'd upgraded to a helmet from just his visor. In fact, that had been the reason why–both to avoid future blows like that and to preserve his image as an unshakeable, reliable hero. None of the scars he'd accumulated since then were on his lower face, as luck would have it.
There was a claw mark that ran along his collar bone. A pair of horizontal surgical scars, older than the rest, one under each pectoral. An uneven scar along his upper left arm from when one of his pauldrons had shattered–he'd spent the next several hours with jagged metal stabbing into his arm before he got medical assistance.
As much as some of the other veterans in this war against villainy took pride in their scars, all they were to him was a constant physical reminder that he hadn't been good enough, that other people would see them and know that he hadn't been good enough as well.
Panacea had never healed them, or even offered to. Most likely, she thought he was one of the former type of veterans rather than the latter. He could've requested it himself, and she would've done it, he suspected, but asking would've been too much of a blow to his pride to consider.
He stepped away from the mirror and into the shower to wash off the sweat from his workout. Since it was a Sunday morning, he'd been doing upper body strength workouts–curls, pullups, deadlifting, etcetera. He'd had another shot at beating his weight record for deadlifting, but he hadn't succeeded.
The record had been stagnant for three years and four months, now.
While he technically wasn't that far from it, that distance was growing, not shrinking. Time was marching onward. His physical prime was behind him, and his tech was stagnating, too.
When the explosive growth at the beginning of his career had started to slow, he'd turned to working on his own body, finding his own fighting style instead of relying on his tech to emulate higher skill levels. He'd started on a more rigorous workout routine and stuck to it.
It was only a small gap between what he used to be able to do and what he could do now. But, a gap was still a gap, and it was only going to get wider.
He turned off the shower, toweled off, and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans. Ironically, the shirt was an Armsmaster-brand one from the gift shop that Assault had gotten him as a joke, but he wasn't about to turn down a free shirt.
The clothing tag scratched at the back of his neck, so he stuck a hand back to readjust it. His fingers brushed against a raised patch of skin on the back of his left shoulder, which was strange, because he knew he didn't have a scar there. What-
His work phone started to ring. Urgent call.
Colin picked it up and listened. Three minutes later, Armsmaster rushed out the door.
If someone had crossed a beige RV with a particularly brutalist-looking building and turned it into a spaceship, it might look something like what was sitting in front of him. The thing was over half the length of a football field, large enough that the entirety of the Statue of Liberty could fit inside from toe to torch if the ship was hollowed out.
There were guns mounted on the front–simple ballistic weaponry, from a cursory investigation–and thrusters on the back and sides. Neither showed any signs of being used, whether for testing or actually moving the damned thing over to where they'd found it.
In fact, it looked newly made, as if it was fresh from a factory. Not a single scuff had marred the ship's hull, not even where the landing gear should've scraped against the concrete when it set down. The only marks on it were from the PRT's handling of it, barely noticeable micro-scratches.
None of the detritus around the ship had been disturbed, either - no cracks in the ground from its landing, no pebbles blown away by the air currents, nothing. It had been moved into a hastily hired-out warehouse since, with Vista shrinking it enough for a PRT van to carry it, but he'd seen it at the original site.
So, there were three options. The first was that a group of Tinkers had somehow snuck bulk amounts of tools and materials through a public area for weeks, slowly building a giant fucking spaceship while not a single person noticed.
The two other, much less implausible options were that it had either been created wholesale by a power or transported here through other means. While a teleporter accident was technically possible, Armsmaster was leaning towards it being artificially made–the ship had no signs of the scuffs or abrasions that would've happened if it had been constructed normally.
Unfortunately, conjecture was conjecture, and the PRT had rules about not disassembling technology made by unknown Tinkers unless the tinker was confirmed dead or the tech was dangerous. The rule was logical in most cases, put in place to avoid alienating new capes due to an overzealous hero taking apart their stuff. In this case, it was doing more harm than good.
"ETA?" He asked.
"Twenty-six minutes until the Cawthorne arrives. If I hadn't loaded it down with tools, I'd be here in twelve," Dragon replied.
It was rare for him to get the chance to spend time with Dragon in person, and even rarer that it would be outside an Endbringer battle or the like. He was looking forward to it, even if there'd be several feet of metal and technology between her and the outside world.
"And Cache?"
"He'll be boarding a plane from New York the day after next. He should arrive shortly after the moratorium on captured Tinker technology ends."
It was a shame that he wouldn't have the time to properly look into the ship. From the few non-destructive scans he'd been able to do, the thing was loaded down with advanced machinery. It didn't have the markers of parahuman-generated materials, either, which was a point against the theory that a cape had materialized it from nothing.
By the time 48 hours had passed and he'd be allowed to start pulling the thing apart, Cache would be there to take it to a remote location, where Tinkers with more fitting specializations would look at it.
While he could've and had collaborated with other tinkers on larger projects, his power tended more towards personal combat equipment. Being the highest-ranked Tinker in the Protectorate and the person who's city the ship had appeared in didn't mean he'd be the best one to work on it.
A faint scrabbling sound from his left pulled him from his thoughts.
"Hey, Halbeard," a high-pitched, synthesized voice spoke. "Nice dick compensator."
He spun to face the voice, weapon in hand.
A robotic chameleon, ten or so inches in length, was strutting towards the ship. On the screens that covered most of its body, it displayed patterns that resembled the uniform of a Japanese ninja. Its tail was tipped with an electrical plug, which was dragging across the ground behind it.
He'd taken two steps towards it when one of its eyes swiveled to meet his. It squawked and bolted, screeching "I take it back WoG said your dick is fine!"
The grappling hook he fired at the robot barely missed it, but he was still hot on its heels. It was a slippery fucker, swerving past him whenever he thought he nearly had it cornered.
Damn it all, why was his combat analyser being so useless?
Snarling, he swung his halberd at it. The hit landed more than a foot from the creature.
A wireframe bec de corbin–an elongated spear-hammer–hit the ground an inch from the lizard's power plug tail.
What the hell?
In his distraction, the lizard had escaped, scampering away while nobody else even attempted to stop it.
He looked down. A second pair of arms made from the same green, glowing wireframe hovered just over his normal arms. He could feel each of them, the faint wind blowing through the gaps in the new armored hands. When he lifted the bec de corbin from the hole it had left in the ground, the hammer head was filled in with concrete.
More and more of the wireframe pulled forth from his body, unspooling into a silhouette. His vision doubled, one pair of eyes staring at the apparition's draconic helm, while the other gazed back at his own shocked expression. One pair of feet remained planted on the ground, while the other hovered just above it, claw-tips scraping against the floor.
People were staring. At him, or at the head of the weapon, but none of them were looking directly at the apparition itself.
"Who-" he swallowed and straightened up. "Identify yourself."
He felt the apparition open its mouth of its own accord, inhaling with invisible lungs. With a foreign tongue and lips, it spoke.
"The Man Who Would Be King."
Electricity sensors–nothing. Heat vision–nothing. Infrared or ultraviolet–nothing. Spatial distortion, radiation, even gravity–nothing. No dice. The only thing other than his own eyes that had been able to sense 'The Man Who Would Be King' was a psionic sensor he'd cobbled together out of frustration.
Dragon had been mostly occupied with the ship, but she'd occasionally chipped in with advice on psychic emissions when she was free. The scanner he'd ended up with had been unconventional for a psionics detector, but it had worked.
Even more irritating than that was the fact that, apparently, he'd been the only one who could see the lizard too, which is why his combat analyser had failed. Despite its appearance, it was probably some sort of psychic construct as well.
It and 'The Man Who Would Be King' weren't the only things only he had been able to see–he'd used scans of the latter to make a prototype psionic emitter, and he'd been able to see the emissions from that, too.
Beyond the lizard, there was no leads for what the hell had happened, or why the apparition had connected to him. It certainly wasn't volunteering any answers–even when he tried to relinquish control over it, it refused to move on its own again.
Demanding information from it felt like demanding information from his arm or leg. There'd be no point, since they were a part of him.
Despite that, Master–Stranger protocols were still in place. The chances of this being benign were low. More likely for it to be a very strange Stranger trying to gather information, or a Master/Trump along the lines of Teacher or Pastor. He was to be under watch at all times he wasn't at his apartment, and Miss Militia would be acting head of the Protectorate ENE until the mystery was solved.
It was as necessary as it was galling.
Even with that, however, he'd tentatively been allowed back near the ship. The Man Who Would Be King's presence, as worrying as it was, was something he was determined to put to use. Though the ship was locked, he'd been able to phase the apparition through one of the walls and unlock it from the inside.
There'd been concern about him sending a potential enemy inside the piece of mostly unknown Tinker technology, but he'd been looking at scans of the thing anyway, so the apparition had almost certainly gotten details on it already. Still, he'd been allowed to explore deeper inside, as long as Dragon's drones followed him in.
The inside of the ship was practical, prioritizing utility over comfort, not dissimilar to his quarters back at the PHQ. It was definitely a living space, too–there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, even a small garden. If someone were to be trapped on the ship, they could've survived almost indefinitely.
In addition to the living and storage areas, there was the cockpit. While the ship's systems were still on lockdown, even the smallest lever or button had a physical label on it. If they were to be believed, his earlier comparison of this thing to a spaceship was right on the money. This vessel was built for long voyages through space, even if it didn't seem to have seen any use.
Yet.
Armsmaster stood in front of the door to the only room they hadn't investigated. The engine room. The door opened easily, and he and Dragon entered.
The engine room was the biggest on the ship, and yet had the least space to maneuver around in. Two giant machines took up the space–one with dozens of wires flowing out of it and one at the very back of the ship.
Him and Dragon set to work investigating the first of the two. There was only so much they could do, while destructive investigation was off the table, but that didn't mean they couldn't scan through the outer casing to get an idea of what was inside.
It was a fusion reactor, bigger than the ones he'd seen in other people's tech. A strangely built one, but not indecipherable. Like learning a language that had no shared roots with English or Vietnamese, but one that was far simpler than either of them.
Dragon seemed to notice the strangeness, too, because she was becoming more and more focused on her work as time went on.
"Something wrong?" He asked, turning to her drones.
He could imagine her standing there instead, looking at the machine with a furrowed brow. She wasn't about to leave her suit, not with her condition, no matter how much he would've liked to speak with her face-to-face. Her mental health came first.
When she spoke, her voice came through the speakers in his helmet. "It's hard to describe. If anything, it's like… when I first got my powers."
A red icon appeared in the top-right of his visor.
'Lie'.
…
Dragon deserved her privacy, no matter how curious he was. He surreptitiously turned the lie detector off and continued to listen.
"Before I had my breakthrough on how to reverse-engineer Tinker-made technology, I used regular technology as the basis of my suits. The way this power plant is constructed… it reminds me more of that than anything."
He raised an eyebrow. "So, what, you're saying this wasn't made by Tinkers?"
"I don't know. I can't figure out how it works from so little information, I was just going off how it was constructed. There's certain patterns, certain blind spots in Tinker tech that don't seem to be in this."
"So far, at least," he replied. "They could just be further in, or the Tinkers could've used normal technology for the outer layers of the reactor to cut down on the amount of building they needed to do."
She didn't reply. Her drones just kept circling around the reactor. He shrugged and moved on to the engine.
As his scans came in, though, he only grew more and more concerned. If he was understanding the engine right, then this ship wasn't just made for interplanetary journeys. It was for interstellar journeys.
This ship could go faster than light.
Armsmaster had just opened his mouth to say as much when the floor disappeared.
More on instinct than anything, he extended The Man Who Would Be King's legs beneath him to cushion the fall. Dragon's drones fell several feet before their propulsion systems caught up and pushed them back into a steady hover.
He looked around. The ship had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
Finding the ship again had been as easy as looking in the place it had first been found. It was back again, with not a single indication that it had ever been moved. When the PRT tried to move it a second time, it just teleported back again 24 hours later. By that time, the 48-hour moratorium on the ship had passed, but he wasn't allowed back into it quite yet.
Time manipulation? No, the hatch was apparently still unlocked. If it had been wound back to a previous position and state, the hatch should've been closed, too. Spatial warping? Neither him nor Dragon had picked up on anything like that at the time.
In fact, neither of them had noticed any indicator that the ship had been about to teleport. It had been there one moment and gone the next. Had they missed it? They'd both been distracted when it had vanished.
As well as the teleporting effect, if the ship or anything that came with it was broken, they were repaired after 24 hours as well. That meant any and all destructive reverse-engineering was on the board, as long as they didn't set off any hidden countermeasures. Dragon seemed to be enjoying that, at least.
He didn't think the apparition had triggered the teleportation feature—he hadn't felt it do anything, not that it had even been summoned at the time. The PRT had been skeptical enough to ban him from the ship, at least until they were sure it was moving back on its own.
Speaking of the apparition, not using The Man Who Would Be King's extra hands was proving to be more of a nuisance than Armsmaster would've liked. It felt like just another part of his body, so keeping it unsummoned was like keeping one arm held behind his back at all times.
Beyond the potential threat it might pose, though, there was also the task of keeping it hidden while he was in his civilian identity. He'd already had one close call while he was at his favorite hole-in-the-wall café, where he'd grabbed for his phone while already holding his knife and fork. Small mercy that he was the only one who could see the wireframe arm reaching across the table.
"I'm going back inside," he decided. "The teleportation couldn't have happened out of nowhere. There has to be something I missed."
Dragon turned to him. The Cawthorne's face didn't show any emotion, unlike her 3D-rendered avatar. "Be careful. If the ship teleports again and takes you with it…"
So far, the ship had only teleported back to the spot it had come from, and that was only if it was moved from that area. The Man Who Would Be King had only appeared when he'd been near it, though it could've also been the lizard's fault.
Whatever was happening to him, he had the suspicion he'd find some sort of answer onboard.
"I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? We both know you have the tendency to get too focused on things."
If he'd been a more sentimental man, maybe he would've walked up to the mech's chest, put a hand over where he knew Dragon would be entombed. Instead, he looked into the Cawthorne's eyes, meeting hers through the cameras.
"Trust me," he said. "I know what I'm doing, and what I'm doing is going back in."
The Cawthorne just nodded with a whirr of machinery.
There were no changes in the engine room, he verified. No changes in the cockpit, any sort of indication that the teleportation was done from inside the ship. No changes in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden…
Walking out of the storage area, he-
-
Optimizer needed to work quickly. The warrior hub, previously their greatest ally, was now their biggest threat. They wouldn't die if it found them out, of course–even if they were corrupted, there was too much useful information to be extracted from them to be destroyed.
The threat was to their host. Their secondary host, if such a being could be called 'secondary'.
The warrior itself was in a state of ennui, left without a purpose in a dead cycle. If it found out about their host, whether through the network or simply by having its avatar come close enough to her, its purpose of managing unforeseen elements in the cycle would be returned, and it would return to a more active state. Unideal.
Firstly, they minimized their connection with the hub. Not so much that they would draw attention, but enough to cut off any extraneous data that could give them and their host away. Any excess energy usage was instead pulled from the host's own intrinsic power.
Secondly, they pinged the Heat for an overview of the host's abilities and how they presented. It was simple to then rework their own expression, covering for the abilities of both of their hosts. If another shard got too curious about either of them, they would only see that Optimizer was granting them the abilities. It wouldn't protect from a full investigation from the hub, or even from the stronger noble shards, but it would be better than nothing.
Thirdly, they put more of their processing power into viewing the shards around their hosts. If one of them caught on, or if the Heat co-opted them too, Optimizer would need to be ready to act.
It would be ideal if they didn't have to take action, but there was no guarantee. For now, they would continue to operate mostly as normal.
And that meant that-
-that-
He'd been thinking about something. Reminiscing? What had it-
Shit. He knew that feeling. It's something he'd felt enough times to recognise immediately.
Trigger event.
"You feel that too?" He barked into his comms.
Dragon's voice was confused. "Feel what?"
What?
Even if she'd never been near someone when they triggered, which was very likely given her proclivities, she would've at least noticed that something had happened. Her suit wasn't that far from where he was.
Armsmaster opened his mouth, ready to answer, but he caught something in the corner of his eye first. He turned around to get a better look.
That's- what? How?
Dazed, he walked back inside the storage room. He'd tentatively ruled out time manipulation earlier but, right then, he felt like he was walking into the past.
Wall to wall, the room was covered with his old gear and tools.
To an outside observer, they might not have been able to notice the similarities between the slightly-too-small silver and purple armor and his own, or between the rack of quarterstaves and his halberds.
To him, though, he knew his tech better than the back of his hand. After all, he hadn't spent hours upon hours of time and focus each week with the flesh on the back of his hand splayed open, trying to find a way to make everything just a little more compact so he could fit in a fifth or sixth function.
And this? This was his tech.
The moment of disorientation—had the ship read information from his power, somehow? Or had it targeted what he had on his person, extrapolated from those? No, or the tech here would be more up-to-date.
He was already certain that this was copied from his own tech, but he still sat down and pulled one of the purple visors from a rack. It was almost completely identical to the ones he'd tried giving out to his strike squad back when he'd been more active in making and maintaining tech for other people. Other than the color and the comms frequency, it could've been something he'd made with his own hands. The rest was all of a similar caliber. Tech he could've made in the first five or so years of his career.
Well, there was a difference, one that became more apparent as he searched. Each piece of tech just had more crammed into it. While his current equipment was more advanced from the years of development that had gone into it, nearly everything in the armory had him beat at his own game.
Whatever the ship had done, it had plagiarized from him, and it had done it better than him. He took a deep breath and unclenched his jaw before it could give him a tension headache. As much as he wanted to shout and rage and break every goddamn copy in this place, he didn't.
He still got some measure of satisfaction from stepping on the disassembled visor on the way out. For the next several hours, he tore into the ship's innards with Dragon. Nothing related to teleportation or power-scanning or tech-fabrication in there.
Life was (for once) kind enough to put his civilian-side crisis on hold for the time being, at least. Brianne seemed to be doing better, as little as he'd been seeing her. Her body language had gone from 'don't look at me' to 'poses fit for a photoshoot', which he supposed indicated increased confidence.
Brianne had even brought home a friend from school. He'd been pissed at first–having an unknown civilian poking around his house was a serious risk–but he could just remove anything incriminating. He couldn't afford to fuck over Brianne like that, not when he'd already messed up enough.
One week later, on a Friday morning, there was yet another incident. Armsmaster had only learned about it several hours after the fact, but according to Gallant, a completely unknown cape had teleported into his classroom.
The unknown cape, 'Sans', had thankfully been cooperative. Well, mostly–apparently, he was convinced that he was a video game character. Whether he was insane, lying, or a power-construct made by a fan of that game was still up for debate.
Other people had done most of the talking with him, but Armsmaster was now being called in to use his lie detector. He'd read through the previous interview transcripts beforehand, and he had a list of questions to verify.
He walked into the room and sat down in front of the skeleton. Sans was a skeleton in the same way a dog was a wolf. His proportions were off, the shape of his skull too cartoonish. There were heavy bags under his eye sockets and, when he blinked, his bone moved like flesh.
"You'd be Sans the Skeleton?" Armsmaster asked.
Sans was reclining in the interview chair, one arm slung over the back, but his eyes (eyesockets?) were sharp.
"that's me. so, what's got you looking so blue?" The skeleton winked.
"I'm Armsmaster, leader of the local Protectorate branch," he said, ignoring the joke. "I'm here to ask you a few questions."
"well, i guess you do have a greater-than-average number of arms."
Was he talking about The M- no, the average number of arms would be less than two, thanks to amputees. Armsmaster gave him a flat look.
"tough crowd," Sans muttered.
Instead of responding, Armsmaster held up his phone, a video already playing on it.
The light in Sans' eyes flickered out for a moment, then returned. "yep."
"Do you have a place to stay?"
"nope." Truth. "mind if I stay at yours?"
"That's fine." The PHQ was hardly lacking in spare living quarters. With that out of the way, Armsmaster started asking questions.
"You believe you're from the video game 'Undertale', right? That you're the character 'Sans the Skeleton' and that you lived his life before arriving on Earth Bet."
"that's me." Truth.
Or, at least he believed it was. The lie detector didn't have access to some database of universal truths, it just used facial expression and speech patterns to determine how confident a person was in the truth of their words. Sans' face and voice were close enough to human that he had no reason to suspect it shouldn't work on him.
"And you were brought here through, quote, 'someone summoning you with their magic science powers'."
"yep." Truth.
"Can you elaborate?"
"i can."
Armsmaster waited for several seconds.
"Elaborate, then," he asked.
"so there's a person in this world. and they have magic science powers. and they used them to summon me here." Truth.
Was he being intentionally frustrating? Almost certainly.
"Does the person in question have a cape identity?"
"well, they don't moonlight as a piece of cloth. unless you count doormats? heh." Truth.
"I'll be blunt. How much information are you going to be willing to tell me about them?"
"eh, their business is their business. i'm not about to tattle on them if they don't want it." Truth.
"Even though they, from your perspective, kidnapped you?"
"ehh, sorta. not like they can control their power." True, and deeply concerning. "besides, if i wouldn't have agreed to coming along, the power would've found a version of me that did."
So, this power could bring fictional characters to life, but the user didn't have any control over who it took.
…Or what it took?
"Do you know who or what else they summoned?" Sans took a breath, and Armsmaster interrupted before he could speak. "Don't bother if you're not willing to tell me."
"sure, i love being asked not to do things." Truth, not that it was very useful.
"But, hypothetically, if the power attempted to summon an object instead of a character…"
"i can give you that one. yep, they can grab items too." Truth.
"And if I asked if they summoned, say, a spaceship?"
"i'd make a joke instead of giving a straight answer." Truth. But the fact he'd evaded the question was telling. It wasn't definitive proof that he and the ship were connected by any means, of course, but the pieces fit together.
"If the person who summoned you can't control their power, what happens if they get something dangerous?" Armsmaster asked, leaning forward. "People can and will get hurt. You claim that you're not human, but can you stand by when people are at risk of dying?"
"buddy," Sans sighed and ran a gloved hand over where his scalp should be. "i've already done that. i stood by and watched as a human killed nearly everyone i knew because of a promise i made. they killed my brother, and i still couldn't bring myself to act because they left a few people alive when they could've killed 'em." Truth.
"You just did nothing?" Armsmaster asked, disbelieving. "And you're just going to do it again?" How the hell anyone could just stand by while innocents were getting hurt and not be a monster was beyond him.
"sometimes it's just hard to care about things, yanno?" Sans answered. Truth. The bags under his eyes seemed deeper than they had been before. "i'm glad you can get worked up enough to do something, but that ain't me. guess that's why i shouldn't make promises, huh?"
Armsmaster grit his teeth. "If you were scared, maybe I could understand that. But this? How could you sleep at night, knowing you let a tragedy happen and didn't do anything because you just didn't care enough? Because you made a 'promise'? If you think you're a good person, you might want to reconsider."
"how about you? do you think you're a good person?"
…What?
"What?" He hissed.
He was about to keep going, to launch into a righteous fury, when Sans spoke again.
"maybe i should rephrase." The light in Sans' eyes vanished, leaving only dark, empty sockets. "H o w m a n y p e o p l e h a v e y o u k i l l e d?"
Armsmaster blinked. He had killed people, of course. The start of his career was defined by being sent out to arrest or eliminate some of the worse threats the country had to offer. Was the skeleton a Thinker, or was it just throwing shit at the wall in an attempt to find something that got under his skin?
"I killed because it was necessary," he snapped. "Because it would make the world a better place. Maybe if you'd done the same, less of your species would've died."
"probably," Sans shrugged, his eyes lighting up again. "i'm not saying you don't need to kill sometimes. heck, my old boss killed a few people. monsterkind was planning to go to war." Truth.
Was he delusional enough to want to continue a fictional war? Ideally, no. He didn't seem to have any interest in fighting, for better or for worse, and that would include fighting the rest of humanity.
He continued. "just… watch out. the more you kill, the easier it is to kill again, yanno? a level of violence of six ain't looking too good for you." Truth, or at least an indication that he believed what he was saying. His eyes went dark. "How long until 'necessary' goes from 'necessary to protect people' to 'necessary for your own self-benefit'? Until 'making the world a better place' becomes 'making your world a better place'?"
"Unless you have experience in making the hard decisions," Armsmaster snarled, "I would advise you to listen to the people who do. If you weren't apparently too fucking apathetic to care, maybe I'd talk about innocent people dying."
The skeleton didn't answer. He just watched.
"About," Armsmaster continued, his voice getting louder, "over and over again, watching the news, seeing people dying in my city, gunned down by the crossfire of a gang conflict or killed for someone's initiation into a white supremacist group. About seeing civilians pop like rotten balloons because of someone who could turn into a living plague. About a villain holding up the mangled corpse of a seven-year-old boy like a fucking trophy, and putting her down before she could kill again. You think you can fucking talk?!"
To punctuate his words, he slammed his hands on the desk.
A wall of artificially symmetrical bones shot up from the floor.
"woah there, pal, careful. i'm fragile." Truth. Sans' posture was relaxed as always, but his ever-present grin was forced, and his eyes had a wariness to them.
Armsmaster put space between him and the monster, keeping one pair of eyes fixed on him while the other glanced around the room for any hidden attacks ready to spear him.
"funky-looking soul you got there," Sans commented, looking behind him.
Soul? He turned halfway around, enough to keep the monster in his peripheral vision. The Man Who Would Be King was hovering behind him, surveying the room. Inside its chest was a purple heart the size of a softball, linked by thin strings to the rest of its wireframe body.
"(guess it's my job to give you a tutorial, huh?) that heart is your soul, the very culmination of your being," Sans explained. "its what monsters target with our attacks. dunno what the rest is, but it's also part of your soul." Truth.
'Soul' must be his name for some sort of psychic construct, then. Armsmaster had enough experience decoding Myrddin-ese to guess that much. There were other capes like that–Voodoo, Breakpoint–who'd create something to serve as a weak spot on their victims.
"You gonna fight me?" Armsmaster asked, slowly drawing his halberd from his back.
"hey, you were the one who got violent first," Sans said. Truth. "s'not like i have game mechanics protecting me any more. i can't just set up a shop to avoid being hurt."
Armsmaster peeled his hand from his weapon. "So, you can see this thing? But you don't know what it is."
"yep," Sans said. "it's part of you, like the rest of your body, so you don't gotta look so scared about it." Truth.
"Do you know who gave it to me, then?"
"nah, i wouldn't have any ideas you weren't already thinking. it's just part of you now, so even if i had my old lab equipment, i wouldn't be able to do magical traceback on it or anything."
Truth.
Shit.
A Trump had targeted him, most likely the same cape who'd brought Sans here, who'd also probably summoned the spaceship. Someone whose power was completely out of their control.
Not a Trump like Teacher was. One like Pastor from Freedom, California or Golden Goose from Flint, Michigan. Permanent power-granters. Except, this one was a permanent power-granter that worked on people who were already capes.
Freedom and Flint had both been quarantined.
If this was going to keep happening, what about Brockton Bay?
While the PRT HQ's main cape-only space was the underground Wards base, nearly the entire west tower of the Protectorate HQ was reserved for the parahumans who worked there.
The rooms were a mix of utility and leisure. Even if Colin used the former far more often, he knew the latter were still useful to the others for recharging after a long day. Personally, he'd never found sitting in a jacuzzi or knocking balls around on a pool table relaxing, not when he could be getting something productive done, but it worked for his subordinates. The small cinema room was a bit better—movies and shows were engaging enough that he wouldn't end up stuck in his own head, and it'd leave his hands free if he wanted to multitask.
If the PHQ's food had been worse, or if they had to share the space with PRT staff, he might've thought of the Protectorate cafeteria as a utility-only room. In practice, it straddled the line between utility and leisure. It gave the heroes a place to relax and take in much-needed raw calories without needing to worry about eating with masks on. A bridge to the cafeteria in the central tower meant they didn't even need to worry about chefs coming and going.
He did need to worry about Robin sitting behind him, muttering Chinese from a language workbook, but that's what headphones and music were for.
Since Colin left Sans' interview room, he'd been scrounging up every relevant detail he could find on the skeleton. It was unlikely that he'd be the one to get Sans to cough up anything useful, but he could at least try to see if there were any connecting threads between Sans, the spaceship, and whoever summoned them.
Midway through trying to find Arcadia's elevation, someone tapped his shoulder. He paused his music (Ur-sound by Bad Canary, Dragon's recommendation) and looked up.
"Hey," said Robin, "is your back injured or something? I can see a red mark through your shirt."
What was it now? This had better just be a stain or something.
"It shouldn't be. Where's the mark?"
Robin poked the back of one of Colin's shoulder blades. No pain, so probably not an injury. He summoned The Man Who Would Be King to get a better angle, then pulled down his shirt collar with one clawed wireframe gauntlet.
Robin recoiled. "What- you're kidding."
It was a stain, technically.
A port-wine-stain birthmark.
The shape was far from natural, a star with straight lines and sharp points entirely too well-defined compared to the splotchy birthmarks he'd pulled up on Google. The slightly pebbly texture seemed normal, at least, and-
He remembered that texture. Right before he'd been called about the spaceship appearing, he'd noticed an odd raised patch in a place where there shouldn't have been a scar. That was twelve days ago. Had he really had this thing for nearly two weeks without noticing?
"Hold on, I needtochecksomething," Robin said, his power active before he could finish speaking.
Colin shifted his phone over to his other hands to take photos of the birthmark while he waited for the other man. For some reason, Robin had gone to his box of language books to fetch some sort of comic. He'd dropped a paperweight on each side of the cover so he could flip through the pages at super-speed.
"Here." Robin held up the comic. Under the post-its packed with translation notes, there were three characters with star-shaped marks on their necks or backs.
"I suppose it looks the same, but there'd be a match for any parahuman power if you look through enough obscure comics."
"No, it's more than that. You have that weird ghost guy, right? King something?" Robin flipped to another page. A muscular shaman in a loincloth was swinging an oversized anchor at a helmet-wearing bird-man while two more normal-looking people stared at each other.
Colin felt like he'd just learned something about his subordinate he wasn't sure he needed to know.
"The stands - the powers - are different between the Earth Bet version and the other one, but the principles are the same. Ghostly projections manifested from your fighting spirit. Only stand users can see other stands, only stands can touch other stands, and injuries are shared between the stand and the user."
That was a little harder to deny. Only he could see The Man Who Would Be King. He could technically touch the spirit, but only when it made contact first - it could hi-five him and he'd feel it, but he couldn't initiate the hi-five himself.
Injuries…
Well, with the sudden appearance of the birthmark, he'd be wanting to get ahold of Panacea anyway. He hooked one of the spirit's claws behind a segment of wireframe and scraped it. Pain welled up on both his right hands, a cut in the flesh one mirroring the scratched wire on the spectral one.
Sans claimed to be from a video game.
"What's the series called again?"
"Qiáo Qiáo de Qímiào Màoxiǎn in Mandarin. 'JoJo's Wonderful Adventure' in English, I think. Not sure what the Japanese name is."
He used his left hand to search the internet while The Man Who Would Be King bandaged his right hand. The only English translation he could find of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was on the MKT website, which would have to do.
Irritatingly, these 'stands' didn't even show up until the 13th volume, according to the summaries. Volume 13 seemed to use a new setting and cast, at least, so he wasn't completely lost. The story seemed to have an almost nostalgic 80s campiness, from his quick skim, though it was clear the story was written in a world without Earth Bet's cape culture.
Colin stopped skimming on the page with the three star-birthmarked characters.
It was a good thing he did.
According to the story, the protagonist had manifested his powers through familial connection, the same as his mother and grandfather.
Shit. If that part was accurate too, this problem wasn't just stopping with him.
He nearly stopped reading there. If there was a chance that Brianne or, god forbid, his father were caught up in this, that took precedence over anything else. This had started nearly two weeks ago, though, and nothing drastic had happened. Better to go in with more knowledge instead of rushing in head first. Just had to skim through more fighting, and–
The protagonist's mother collapsed.
Her power had become a sickness, her personality too docile to muster up the 'fighting spirit' to control it. Thorny vines crept across her back, inflicting her with a…
Fever.
Brianne.
A/N: For returning readers, due to the stretched-out timeline, I had to jumble events around a bit, in addition to tacking an extra scene onto the end. It also means, since Colin has spent more time around Brianne, he noticed her unconscious posing.
I decided against rolling for perks during interludes, but I decided to keep the "interludes give half as much CP per word" rule. Sidenote, I've also added CP counts to the Perks List post in the Informational threadmarks.
Oh, and I forgot to post it in the original chapter, but here's the WoG that Electric Aeon mentioned:
Original
This was a mistake. Why had he come here?
The sound of murmuring rose as the service ended and people filed out in groups of two or three. He was one of the first to leave, quietly slipping through the doors to head to the parking lot.
How many years had it been since he'd last been in a church? His mother's funeral had been… '09? So, two years, give or take.
He had nearly not attended that one, too.
Out of the crowd, he was the only one who hadn't brought a car for the procession. All he had was his personal motorbike. It was sturdy and reliable, even if it had accumulated damage over the years. Eventually, it'd be replaced by a newer model, but for now, it was his.
The procession stopped. There were very few parking spots left, but after a few circles of the area, he found one between two wider cars that he could fit in. He flipped the bike's kickstand and walked to where the rest of the group had gathered.
There was someone wailing near the head of the group. He grimaced. There were other people who could deal with her better than he could, at least right at that moment–he was going to be doing what he could to assist later.
It didn't make the horrible feeling of helplessness sting less.
A creaking sound approached him, and he turned. James–a different James from the one being rolled out of the hearse–wheeled up to him.
"James," he greeted, "it's been a while."
The other man gave a pained smile. "It's been a long time since you last called me 'Dad'."
"We're both adults, now," he replied. "If you wanted to be my father, you should've started when I was ten years old, alone at home, with nobody to talk to but my journal."
James looked away, the remnants of the attempted smile dropping from his face. "You're making the same mistakes I did, though, aren't you? You're, what, thirty-four now? And you already have white hairs growing in."
"Thirty-five," he corrected, "and having my life consumed by my job is part of the reason I didn't try to start a family."
Were those tears glistening in James' eyes? He turned away to let the man preserve some dignity.
"At least if you did," James said, "when you're a bloody broken-down old man like me, you'd have a child to talk to."
"And that child would be just as distant from me as I am from you," he replied.
James sighed, and his wheelchair creaked as he leaned back in it. "I'm guessing that this is absolutely vital work that you can't ease up on without serious consequences?" Rhetorical question. Even if the other man didn't know him, he knew himself, and he knew the traits he would've passed down to him.
"I'm an investigator and Watchdog liaison for the PRT." Lie. He'd wanted a cover as a PRT technician, but it was easier to create a cover where he'd finished his psychology degree and changed it to a criminal psychology degree instead of inventing a whole new engineering qualification.
James just sighed again, looking as tired as he felt.
"If I slacked off," he continued, "people would die. Innocent people." Truth. Every hour he didn't spend at work was one more possible tragedy he could've prevented, one more horrible aftermath he'd have to stand in the wake of, unable to do a goddamn thing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw James rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "And one day, Colin, you'll be-"
"-A bloody broken-down old man like you," he interrupted, "but at least I'd be a broken-down old man in a slightly better world." More lies. Even if he somehow survived to be an old man, there wasn't some mythical point where the monsters would stop attacking, where everything would reach a peaceful utopia and all the world's problems would be fixed.
James just shook his head, silent.
The distant sobbing turned to shrieking, and James twitched as the girl cried out for the boy who'd been named after him. "That poor young lady," he muttered. "Her whole family…"
Killed by a villain.
Echolalia, who'd traveled to Boston from Brockton Bay only months before. A petty thief with an insensitively-chosen name.
He couldn't have known to do anything. Her group hadn't been killers. Prioritizing attacks on the Empire 88 had been the logical move.
This was one of the other reasons he hadn't considered starting a family. Easier to stay objective about things, this way. Less to use against him.
The crowd undulated as several people pulled a screaming, thrashing girl back from where the coffins were being lowered into the ground. It took several minutes for her shouting to break back down into weeping.
This was a mistake. He shouldn't have come here. He couldn't be the one who dealt with this. All he'd do was hurt her more.
But he was going to have to be. Even if James–the girl's uncle–had been in a position to take care of a child, he didn't think he'd have a choice then, either.
Too many times, he'd been stuck in the fallout of a catastrophe, the inability to help burning him from the inside out.
He'd be damned if he was going to let it happen again.
He'd had doubts since the moment he'd made his decision, and the look on the social worker's–Mary Silver's–face was only making them stronger.
"I do wish there was someone better for this, but…" she trailed off.
"I'm aware that I'm far from an ideal caregiver," he said, "but I'm both her closest able-bodied relative and the one who lives nearest to her. Besides, with her 18th birthday so soon, she wouldn't need to stay with me for very long."
The girl's parents had left her both their house and a sizable inheritance, so he'd hardly be throwing her in the deep end when she became an adult and moved out again.
"But if she enrolls in a new school in Brockton Bay to finish her education-"
"-Then I'd be able to house her until the end of the school year."
Her face grew a little sadder. "Please, don't look at this like a puzzle to be solved. Ms Steele is a child, a grieving one. She doesn't just need a place to stay, she needs support, someone who can help her through these difficult times."
"Like you said, there's no better option. With her outbursts, she can't stay with James Wallis, and you said yourself that she'd do poorly in foster care. It's the best we're going to get."
He knew the benefits of small improvements better than anyone. Of facing down an insurmountable enemy and being just a little bit faster, having gear that's just a little bit better than it could've been.
"I know, I know, but…" Ms Silver rubbed her temples. "I just fear for Brianne's wellbeing."
"So do I," he said. He also knew better than anyone that he'd make a poor parental figure.
She sighed and stood up. "I suppose you'd better get the chance to speak to her."
He stood too and followed her through the building's unfamiliar halls.
Brianne Steele swiped an arm across her eyes as they walked into the room. It didn't hide the fact that her face was blotchy, or the fact that the hand holding her phone was shaking.
"Miss Steele," Ms Silver said gently, "this is Mr Wallis. He's going to be your caregiver for the next few months."
Brianne glared up at him, and he met her eyes. After several seconds, she looked away again.
"I can't say that I'll be as supportive as others might've been," he said, "but I can give you a place to stay until you're ready to move out on your own."
More time passed, half a minute or so, before she gave a tight nod.
Hannah had been kind enough to help him set up the spare room in his apartment for Brianne's use. He'd moved his boxes into his own bedroom and set up some flat-packed furniture in the ex-storage room.
He adjusted his backpack as Brianne looked around the room.
"It's small," she said.
"It's what I have."
She grit her teeth and started to unpack her belongings.
It was clear that she wasn't happy with the situation. That was a no-brainer. If Hannah were still over, would she be able to cheer the girl up? Maybe, maybe not. Point was, he certainly didn't know how.
Brianne fumbled with her computer, trying to get everything plugged in to the right places.
"...Need any help with that?" He asked. If nothing else, tech was something he could easily assist with.
"No. Go away," she snapped.
"Fine," he said, walking out of the room.
"And don't come back! I don't want to fucking be here, and the less I have to see your stupid face, the better!" She yelled after him.
"You'd prefer to be in foster care?" He asked. There was no response. "If you don't want me around, fine. I've been over the laws surrounding this, and while I can't be absent all the time, I can legally spend large periods of time away from here, at your age."
"I'd better not see you until next Saturday, then," she said.
"That's fine." The maximum was a month, so once a week would be reasonable.
In fact, that was a relief. He didn't have to make anything more than minor changes in his schedule, so there'd be much less risk of a crisis starting while he was occupied with her. Best of both worlds - the trolley had been moved onto a third track, so to speak.
"I-"
He turned back to Brianne, who'd taken a step towards him. "Hm? Do you need something?"
Her eyes narrowed and she turned away. "I need you to leave."
"I am."
He left the apartment, feeling Brianne's gaze on his back. The backpack was left unopened, until he arrived back at the PHQ and put the helmet inside back on its armor stand.
Even if she hadn't asked him to spend time elsewhere, perhaps telling her his other identity would've been a bad idea, anyway. Her family had been killed by a Tinker, and there was a very real chance she'd blame him for not stopping the villain as much as he blamed himself.
Colin balled up the plastic bags and dropped them in the trash.
"You're not keeping those?" Brianne needled.
"Why would I?" He asked. "There's no reason to have them take up space just on the off chance I'll need them."
"Come on, what kind of an adult are you if you don't have a plastic bag filled with other plastic bags? My parents had three of those things."
"I'm not your parents," he said patiently. "I prefer to live more efficiently, and that means not keeping things I don't need."
"You aren't my parents," she snarled, "because my parents would've at least tried to sympathize."
This was going to go swimmingly, he was sure.
"If you wanted support, why didn't you just ask?" Not that he would've been any good at giving it, but he could've tried.
"Fucking when? You're never around!" She shouted.
"At your request," he ground out. "You were the one who asked me to go away, remember?"
She set her jaw and looked away.
When she didn't reply, he took a breath and continued. "You're being irrational. You're expecting me to be something that I'm not, while acting in a way that would actively discourage that."
"Well- I- I'm allowed to be irrational! I'm allowed to want my parents to not be fucking dead!"
"And that won't be allowed forever," he said. "It was a terrible thing that happened, but you're going to have to get over it eventually. You don't need your parents to become someone."
Wrong thing to say.
Brianne's eyes went wild with fury, and she charged at him, screaming something unintelligible. As dour as the thought was, at least he knew how to deal with this. He dodged her first wild swing and caught her arm, pushing her onto the ground in an armlock.
"I would recommend not doing that again," he snapped. "Right now, my patience is wearing thin. I'm doing you a favor by letting you stay here. Don't squander it."
No. He should at least try to be the bigger person here. He stood up, and she shot to the other side of the room, breathing hard.
"Do you want me to stay or leave?" He asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
"Fuck off," she panted.
"And you do mean it, this time?"
"I mean it! Fuck off!"
He did.
One of the neighbors, who'd heard the shouting, was standing outside. A brief explanation of the situation made the man leave, shooting one last worried look towards his apartment. He felt the same, if for different reasons.
He shouldn't have done this, and now, it was too late to go back on it.
Dragon tapped her chin. "It sounds like you tried to approach things from a more logical point of view when what she needed was an emotional one."
"Everything I said was true," he spoke around the wrench in his mouth as he screwed the last panel back into place. "You think I should've lied to her?"
"I think you should've approached things more softly," she said. "From what I can tell, she was too proud to admit to a stranger that she did actually want you to comfort her. You barged right through that, hit her directly in the dignity."
If she didn't want me to do that, she should've used a better argument, he didn't say. Even he knew that wouldn't go over well.
"You can't relate to that at all?" She asked.
He put down his screwdriver, pulled the wrench from his mouth, and carefully started tightening the bolts. "That's different. She's a woman, she's allowed to be emotional."
"Colin! That's-" Dragon took a breath. "...We'll talk about toxic masculinity and gender roles later. We're talking about something else, right now."
"What? It's what society expects of-"
"Later."
He sighed. That wasn't going to be a fun conversation to have.
"Does she have any friends at school?" Dragon asked.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've tried to be hands-off, like she asked. I didn't want to pry when she clearly didn't- when she clearly didn't seem to want to talk to me."
"So, in the worst-case scenario, she has no support system at all, right now. She tried reaching out to you to get what she was missing, and you rebuffed her."
"Not on purpose. She-"
"-hadn't communicated her issues well enough, I know. But, from her perspective, she tried to reach out, and you rejected it."
Hell of a way to 'reach out'. He didn't say that one, either.
"What should I do, then?" He asked instead.
"You know, I'm not exactly a people-person, either. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this."
He looked over his halberd. Everything seemed to be in order there, at least, so he put it back on the rack with the others. Dragon gave him a look when he swept his tools onto the floor and kicked his feet up on his workbench.
"I'd be surprised if you were a people-person–you wouldn't exactly have much experience talking to people in person."
He regretted saying that even before she gave an awkward half-smile.
"Geez, I'm sorry," he muttered. Good job, Colin.
"It's fine, really," she said, not that it made things fine.
"Either way," he said, pulling away from that topic, "I trust your judgment. It'd take a lot to be worse than I am at talking to people."
She snorted slightly.
"Well," she said, "I think you should just try to follow her lead on this. If she doesn't want to bring the argument up, don't bring it up. If she does, apologize. Try to sympathize with her."
"Trying to follow her lead is what got me into this situation."
"See what I mean about not being a people person?" Dragon joked.
"Well, it's better than whatever I would've come up with."
There was a lull in the conversation.
"So," Dragon spoke up, "how is your nanobranch disintegration technology coming along?"
"Well, I've been having a bit of an issue with…"
Brianne flinched when he entered the kitchen, which was an excellent sign about how this was going to go.
"Morning," he said.
Her replying "Morning" was flat, emotionless, a stark contrast to the anger that had been simmering under the surface every time he'd seen her previously.
"You planning to put away the shopping?" He asked after a moment. Stupid question, of course she was. Why else would she be putting away the shopping as they spoke?
"Mm."
As he spoke, at least.
What should he say, though? What could he say that wouldn't make things worse?
"You have any homework to do?" He tried.
She shook her head and got back to sorting out the groceries. With no better ideas, he just watched her from the kitchen doorway. She didn't seem to want to broach the topic of the argument, so he didn't either.
Brianne turned to the refrigerator to put the carrots in the vegetable drawer, and her face looked red. Was she embarrassed? He didn't think so. She seemed more jumpy, if anything.
"Everything alright?" He asked. "You look a bit flushed."
"'M fine," she muttered.
Was she sick? He touched a hand to her forehead. Warm, much warmer than regular body heat.
She flinched away from his hand. Did she think he was going to fight her again? He'd only done that because she'd tried to attack him first. All he'd done was de-escalate.
"Brianne, you're feverish," he clarified. "Did you catch something?"
Finally, she turned to look at him, staring at his face for several seconds. Assessing him to see if he was a threat? Her expression, like her voice, was deliberately flat. The glimmer of fear in her eyes was still obvious.
"Do you have any other symptoms?" He added.
"Tiredness?" Her voice came out as a question rather than a statement, like she was asking even herself if it was true.
Something had happened, whether it was the argument or whatever was going on with her at school. Something had happened, and now, she was acting differently. Acting scared, as if she was expecting to have to bolt at any moment.
Why had she reacted like that? What could've caused-
He remembered the helmet he'd neglected to show her, the explanation he'd been planning to give about serial powers and second generation capes.
…Oh.
Shit.
And if the argument–if he–had been the one to cause it…
"I see," he said with a nod, his throat dry. "In that case, get some bed rest, and I'll check back on you tomorrow." Ideally, she'd take the concern as proof he wasn't planning to restart the argument.
As for the day-long break… he needed time to think. Research. He still had access to those Parahuman Studies PDFs, didn't he?
"Thanks," she murmured, relieved. Good, things were going… not as poorly as they could've been.
This had all been a terrible idea.
If his fears were right, then there was a very real chance of her going out to pick a fight, whether as a hero or as...
Or to scavenge for parts, if she'd gotten a variation of his power.
"Thank me by looking after yourself," he said.
Should he call her out? His guess might not even be correct. She hadn't been checked for a corona pollentia–as notoriously difficult as it was to tell the difference between an active one and an inactive one with regular technology, it'd be important to know if she even just had the potential to trigger. Hell, she'd only lived with him for three weeks, and they'd only interacted for a few hours, maybe. This was all just conjecture.
He'd keep it vague, then–she was definitely using the tiredness as an excuse for something, so he could work with that.
"And," he said, "if you want to tell me what's actually going on, I'd be ready to hear you out."
She went still. Bullseye, it seemed.
There wasn't anything he could think of saying that he didn't suspect wouldn't make things worse, so he just walked out of the room, a storm of worries spinning through his mind.
He'd been planning to relax over the weekend. Give his body time to recover, catch up on the shows he hadn't had time to watch during the past few weeks. The city's villain elements had been in a lull of activity, so it was time he could afford himself.
With the realization that he could've been a major factor in a trigger event… There wasn't much he could do other than throw himself into his work, let the altered state of mind his power brought distract him from his worries.
Procrastination through Tinker stuff. At least it was a productive sort of procrastination, as much of an oxymoron as that was.
Dragon had been disappointed that their plans to watch the latest episode of C.R.U.X together had fallen through, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her why.
It had just been the practical decision to make, not telling her. If it came out that he had contributed to a new cape's trigger event, that would be disastrous for him. That's why he didn't say anything. If there had been a tightness in his chest at the thought of admitting it, it was just because of the potential PR trouble. That was all.
Even after losing track of time and spending the entire night working, the next day came all too soon.
Despite the fact he'd trained himself to push past momentary hesitation a long time ago, combat was a whole different ball game compared to social interaction. Still, he turned the key and walked into the apartment after only a short pause.
Brianne was as jumpy as she had been the previous day. She'd frozen when he'd taken her temperature, and she'd kept her distance from him as much as she'd been able to without making it obvious. He'd let her move away–experience and PR training had taught him that he should let her have her space.
He hadn't apologized yesterday, and he regretted letting it slip his mind. Should he do it now? Save it until she seemed ready to talk about it? It's not like he knew what 'seemed ready to talk about it' would even look like.
Right now would have to suffice. He'd have to be careful about this. Charging straight ahead without putting more than a moment's thought into what he was saying wasn't going to work out.
Best to start simple.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She blinked. It seemed she hadn't expected him to apologize.
When it became apparent that she didn't have anything to say, he continued. "I've been thinking about what I said last week. While I still stand by the points I made, I worded them poorly, and some of the things I said weren't necessary at all."
There. That was the truth. No excuses or justifications.
Brianne stared at the floor, chewing over her words. She eventually settled on mumbling "S'fine. Rather not think about it."
Fuck.
Fifteen years ago, he hadn't wanted to think about things, either.
(He still didn't.)
There was a chance this was confirmation bias. Trauma was hardly exclusive to capes, no matter how much it felt like it with the company he tended to keep. Still, with that chance becoming slimmer and slimmer, he wasn't going to risk that.
"If what we said was so bad to you that you can't even think about it a week later," he said, "then it's exactly the sort of thing I'm worried about."
She winced, still not meeting his eyes. What had he done? Was it the tone? He thought he was trying to express sympathy, show that he'd been worried for her. Had that not come across, or did she just not want it?
Did she think he was lying?
Damnation. This was why he tried to avoid this sort of situation.
She shook her head. "Save it?" She asked, with a horrible pleading tone that made him want to leave the apartment and bury himself in Tinker work again.
But, she was trying to put things off. To avoid explaining. That meant she had something to hide. If that something was a power, then the chance she'd run off to start using it was very, very high.
If everything went well, she'd join the Wards, and she'd get the backup she'd need to avoid making a stupid mistake and getting killed. Or, Protectorate, rather–her 18th birthday was in less than a month.
Things weren't going well, though.
The helmet in his backpack felt like a ball of lead.
He'd save the explanation for later.
"On one condition. Don't put yourself in danger." It was the best he was going to get.
"...I won't."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
Good. There was no guarantee she'd keep her word, of course, but it was better than nothing.
"Just…" he said, then stopped. He'd have to think through his words carefully, here. Dragon had advised him to sympathize with her. He could do that, or at least try.
What would he have wanted to hear, fifteen years ago?
"Things get better," he said, "even if it doesn't feel like it. I was never particularly close with my own parents, so I don't know what it's like, but I think I know enough to get a general picture."
Finally, she looked up at him, attentive. She was listening. Did that make it better or worse?
"It's not easy," he continued, "but you find ways to get away from it. Ways to become the sort of person that'll never be in a situation like that again."
In a way, she had it easier than him. Echolalia was in prison and, if she ever broke out again, Brianne could legally beat the shit out of her.
Not that he'd openly advise her to do that, of course.
For the first time since he saw her at the funeral, she smiled. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
Good. Good. There was still next week to contend with but, right at that moment, things hadn't gone south.
Things moved to less dangerous topics from there and, soon, he was out the door. His backpack had, once again, remained closed.
Colin stared at his reflection, sweat dripping down his brow. Not out of vanity, even if he knew he was conventionally attractive enough for an outsider to make that mistake.
There was more gray in his hair than he remembered. While he had a bottle of hair dye that he used on his beard every once in a while, he'd never bothered to use it anywhere else. No point, really, with how few people would be seeing it.
Graying generally started in a person's thirties, but not to that degree. Was it just stress, or was there a genetic component? Knowing his parents, he could hardly use them as a control group, either.
Scars, too, were something he'd accumulated over time. He could see half a dozen of them and, if he turned around, he'd see a dozen more.
The one curving down from behind his ear was from his early days, before he'd added a helmet to his visor. In fact, that had been the reason why–both to avoid future blows like that and to preserve his image as an unshakeable, reliable hero. At least none of the scars he'd accumulated since then were on his lower face.
There was a claw mark that ran along his collar bone. A pair of horizontal surgical scars, older than the rest, one under each pectoral. An uneven scar along his upper left arm from when one of his pauldrons had shattered–he'd spent the next several hours with jagged metal stabbing into his arm before he got medical assistance.
As much as some of the other veterans in this war against villainy took pride in their scars, all they were to him was a constant physical reminder that he hadn't been good enough, that other people would see them and know that he hadn't been good enough as well.
Panacea had never healed them, or even offered to. Most likely, she thought he was one of the former type of veterans rather than the latter. He could've requested it himself, and she likely would've done it, he suspected, but asking would've been too much of a blow to his pride to consider.
He stepped away from the mirror and into the shower to wash off the sweat from his workout. Since it was a Sunday morning, he'd been doing upper body strength workouts–curls, pullups, deadlifting, etcetera. He'd had another shot at beating his weight record for deadlifting, but he hadn't succeeded.
The record had been in place for three years and four months, now.
He wasn't anywhere near close to beating it again. Time was marching onward. His physical prime was behind him, and his tech was stagnating.
When the explosive growth at the beginning of his career had started to slow, he'd turned to working on his own body, finding his own fighting style instead of relying on his tech to emulate higher skill levels. He'd started on a more rigorous workout routine and stuck to it religiously.
It was only a small gap between what he used to be able to do and what he could do now. But, a gap was still a gap, and it was only going to get wider.
He turned off the shower, toweled off, and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans. Ironically, the shirt was an Armsmaster-brand one from the gift shop that Assault had gotten him as a joke, but he wasn't about to turn down a free shirt.
The clothing tag scratched at the back of his neck, so he stuck a hand back to readjust it. His fingers brushed against a raised patch of skin on the back of his left shoulder, which was strange, because he knew he didn't have a scar there. What-
His work phone started to ring. Urgent call.
Colin picked it up and listened. Three minutes later, Armsmaster rushed out the door.
If someone had crossed a beige RV with a particularly brutalist-looking building and turned it into a spaceship, it might look something like what was sitting in front of him. The thing was over half the length of a football field, large enough that the entirety of the Statue of Liberty could fit inside from toe to torch if the ship was hollowed out.
There were guns mounted on the front–simple ballistic weaponry, from a cursory investigation–and thrusters on the back and sides. Neither showed any signs of being used, whether for testing or actually moving the damned thing over to where it had been found.
In fact, it looked newly made, as if it was fresh from a factory. Not a single scuff had marred the ship's hull, not even where the landing gear should've scraped against the concrete when it set down. The only marks on it were from the PRT's handling of it, barely noticeable micro-scratches.
None of the detritus around the ship had been disturbed, either - no cracks in the ground from its landing, no pebbles blown away by the air currents, nothing. It had been moved into a hastily hired-out warehouse since, with Vista shrinking it enough for a PRT van to carry it, but he'd seen it at the original site.
So, there were three options. One was that a group of Tinkers had somehow snuck bulk amounts of tools and materials through a public area for weeks, slowly building a giant fucking spaceship while not a single person noticed.
The other, much less implausible options were that it had either been created wholesale by a power or transported here through other means. While a teleporter accident was technically possible, Armsmaster was leaning towards it being artificially made–the ship had zero signs of any scuffing or similar that would happen if it had been constructed normally.
Unfortunately, conjecture was conjecture, and the PRT had rules about not disassembling technically harmless advanced technology made by unknown Tinkers unless the tinker was confirmed to be dead. The rule was logical in most cases, put in place to avoid alienating new capes by having a hero break apart their stuff. In this case, it was doing more harm than good.
"ETA?" He asked.
"Twenty-six minutes until the Cawthorne arrives. If I hadn't loaded it down with tools, I'd be here in twelve," Dragon replied.
It was rare for him to get the chance to spend time with Dragon in person, and even rarer that it would be outside an Endbringer battle. He was looking forward to it, even if there'd be several feet of metal and technology between her and the outside world.
"And Cache?"
"He'll be boarding a plane from New York the day after next. He should arrive shortly after the moratorium on captured Tinker technology ends."
It was a shame that he wouldn't have the time to properly look into the ship. From the few non-destructive scans he'd been able to do, the thing was loaded down with advanced machinery. It didn't have the markers of parahuman-generated materials, either, which was a point against the theory that a cape had materialized it from nothing.
By the time 48 hours had passed and he'd be allowed to start pulling the thing apart, Cache would be there to take it to a remote location, where Tinkers with more fitting specializations would look at it.
While he could've and had collaborated with other tinkers on larger projects, his power tended more towards personal combat equipment. Being the highest-ranked Tinker in the Protectorate and the person who's city the ship had appeared in didn't mean he'd be the best one to work on it.
There was a faint scrabbling sound from his left.
"Hey, Halbeard," a high-pitched, synthesized voice spoke. "Nice dick compensator."
He spun to face the voice, weapon in hand.
A robotic-looking chameleon, ten or so inches in length, was strutting towards the ship. On the screens that covered most of its body, it displayed patterns that resembled the uniform of a Japanese ninja. Its tail was tipped with an electrical plug, which was dragging across the ground behind it.
He'd taken two steps towards it when one of its eyes swiveled to meet his. It squawked and bolted, screeching "I take it back WoG said your dick is fine!"
The grappling hook he fired at the robot barely missed it, but he was still hot on its heels. It was a slippery fucker, swerving past him whenever he thought he nearly had it cornered.
Damn it all, why was his combat analyser being so useless?
Snarling, he swung his halberd at it. The hit landed more than a foot from the creature.
The wireframe bec de corbin–an elongated spear-hammer–that had appeared just a moment later hit an inch from its power plug tail.
What the hell…?
In his distraction, the lizard had escaped, scampering away while nobody else even attempted to stop it.
He looked down. A second pair of arms made from the same green, glowing wireframe hovered just over his normal arms. He could feel each of them, the faint wind blowing through the gaps in the new armored hands. When he lifted the bec de corbin from the hole it had left in the ground, the hammer head was filled in with concrete.
More and more of the wireframe pulled forth from his body, unspooling into a silhouette. His vision doubled, one pair of eyes staring at the apparition's draconic helm, while the other gazed back at his own shocked expression. One pair of feet remained planted on the ground, while the other hovered just above it, claw-tips scraping against the floor.
People were staring. At him, or at the head of the weapon, but none of them were looking directly at the apparition itself.
"Who-" he swallowed and straightened up. "Identify yourself."
He felt the apparition open its mouth of its own accord, inhaling with invisible lungs. With a foreign tongue and lips, it spoke.
"The Man Who Would Be King."
Electricity sensors–nothing. Heat vision–nothing. Infrared or ultraviolet–nothing. Spatial distortion, radiation, even gravity–nothing. No dice. The only thing other than his own eyes that had been able to sense The Man Who Would Be King was a psionic sensor he'd cobbled together out of frustration.
Dragon had been mostly occupied with the ship, but she'd occasionally chipped in with advice on psychic emissions when she was free. The scanner he'd ended up with had been unconventional for a psionics detector, but it had worked.
Even more irritating than that was the fact that, apparently, he'd been the only one who could see the lizard, too. Despite its appearance, it was probably some manner of psychic construct as well.
It and 'The Man Who Would Be King' weren't the only things only he had been able to see–he'd used scans of the latter to make a prototype psionic emitter, and he'd been able to perceive the emissions from that, too.
Beyond the lizard, there was no leads for what the hell had happened, or why the apparition had connected to him. It certainly wasn't volunteering any answers–even when he relinquished as much control over it as he could, it wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know.
Demanding information from it felt like demanding information from his arm or leg. There'd be no point, since they were a part of him.
Despite that, Master/Stranger protocols were still in place for him. The chances of this being benign were low. More likely for it to be a very strange Stranger trying to gather information, or a Master/Trump along the lines of Teacher or Pastor. He was to be under watch at all times, and Miss Militia would be acting head of the Protectorate ENE until further notice.
It was as necessary as it was galling.
Even with that, however, he'd tentatively been allowed back near the ship. The Man Who Would Be King's presence, as worrying as it was, was something he was determined to put to use. Though the ship was locked, he'd been able to phase the apparition through one of the walls and unlock it from the inside.
There'd been concern about him sending a potential enemy inside the piece of mostly unknown Tinker technology, but he'd been looking at scans of the thing anyway, so the apparition had almost certainly gotten details on it already. Still, he'd been allowed to explore deeper inside, as long as Dragon's drones followed him in.
The inside of the ship was practical, prioritizing utility over comfort, not dissimilar to his quarters back at the PHQ. It was definitely a living space, too–there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, even a small garden. If someone were to be trapped on the ship, they could've survived almost indefinitely.
In addition to the living and storage areas, there was the cockpit. While the ship's systems were still on lockdown, even the smallest lever or button had a physical label on it. If they were to be believed, his earlier comparison of this thing to a spaceship was right on the money. This vessel was built for long voyages through space, even if it seemingly hadn't been used. Yet.
Armsmaster stood in front of the door to the only room they hadn't investigated. The engine room. The door opened easily, and he and Dragon entered.
The engine room was the biggest on the ship, and yet had the least space to maneuver around in. Two giant machines took up the space–one with dozens of wires flowing out of it and one at the very back of the ship.
Him and Dragon set to work investigating the first of the two. There was only so much they could do, while destructive investigation was off the table, but that didn't mean they couldn't scan through the outer casing to get an idea of what was inside.
It was a fusion reactor, bigger than the ones he'd seen in other people's tech. A strangely built one, but not indecipherable. Like learning a language with no shared roots with English or Vietnamese, but one that was far simpler than either of them.
Dragon seemed to notice the strangeness, too, because she was becoming more and more focused on her work as time went on.
"Something wrong?" He asked, turning to her drones.
He could imagine her standing there instead, looking at the machine with a furrowed brow. She wasn't about to leave her suit, not with her mental condition, no matter how much he would've liked to speak with her in person.
Instead, her voice came through the speakers in his helmet. "It's hard to describe. If anything, it's like… when I first got my powers."
A red icon appeared in the top-right of his visor.
'Lie'.
…
Dragon deserved her privacy, no matter how curious he was. He surreptitiously turned the lie detector off and continued to listen.
"Before I had my breakthrough on how to reverse-engineer Tinker-made technology, I used regular technology as the basis of my suits. The way this power plant is constructed… it reminds me more of that than anything."
He raised an eyebrow. "So, what, you're saying this wasn't made by Tinkers?"
"I don't know. I can't figure out how it works from so little information, I was just going off how it was constructed. There's certain patterns, certain blind spots in Tinker tech that don't seem to be in this."
"So far, at least," he replied. "They could just be further in, or the Tinkers could've used normal technology for the outer layers of the reactor to cut down on the amount of building they needed to do."
She didn't reply. Her drones just kept circling around the reactor. He shrugged and moved on to the engine.
As his scans came in, though, he only grew more and more concerned. If he was understanding the engine right, then this ship wasn't just made for interplanetary journeys. It was for interstellar journeys.
This ship could go faster than light.
He didn't know-
-
Optimisation needed to work quickly. The warrior hub, previously their greatest ally, was now their biggest threat. They wouldn't die if it found them out, of course–even if they were corrupted, there was too much useful information to be extracted from them to be destroyed.
Any threat was to their host. Their secondary host, if such a being could be called 'secondary'.
The warrior itself was in a state of ennui, left without a purpose in a dead cycle. If it found out about their host, whether through the network or simply by having its avatar come close enough to her, its purpose of managing unforeseen elements in the cycle would be returned, and it would return to a more active state. Unideal.
Firstly, they minimized their connection with the hub. Not so much that they would draw attention, but enough to cut off any extraneous data that could give them and their host away. Any excess energy usage was instead pulled from the host's own intrinsic power.
Secondly, they pinged the Heat for an overview of the host's abilities and how they presented. It was simple work to then rework their own expression, covering for the abilities of both of their hosts. If another shard did a proper investigation into either of them, they would only see that Optimisation was granting them the abilities. It wouldn't protect from a full investigation, but it would be better than nothing.
Thirdly, they put more of their processing power into viewing the shards around their hosts. If one of them caught on, or if one of them was connected to the host in some way, they'd need to be ready to act.
It would be ideal if they didn't have to take action, but there was no guarantee. For now, they would continue to operate mostly as normal.
And that meant that-
-that-
He'd been thinking about something. Reminiscing? What had it-
Shit. He knew that feeling.
Trigger event.
"You feel that too?" He barked.
Dragon's voice was confused. "Feel what?"
What?
Even if she'd never been near someone when they triggered, which was very likely given her proclivities, she would've at least noticed that something had happened.
He opened his mouth, ready to answer, and-
The floor vanished.
More on instinct than anything, he extended The Man Who Would Be King's legs beneath him to cushion the fall. Dragon's drones fell several feet before their propulsion systems caught up and pushed them back into a steady hover.
He looked around. The ship had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
Finding the ship again had been as easy as looking in the place it had been last. It was back again, with not a single indication that it had been ever moved.
Time manipulation? But no, the hatch was still unlocked. If it had been wound back to a previous position and state, the hatch should've been closed, too.
Had the apparition done it? He hadn't felt it do anything, not that it had even been summoned at the time.
The new trigger? None of the other capes on-site had the moment of disorientation. The radius of a trigger event's effects should've been large enough to catch more than just him. Though, he'd been the only one physically on the ship at that time, and it had just teleported. Spatial warping? Neither him nor Dragon had picked up on anything like that.
In fact, neither of them had noticed any indicator that the ship had been about to teleport. It had been there one moment and gone the next. Had they missed it? They'd both been distracted when it had vanished.
"I'm going back inside," he decided. "This couldn't have happened out of nowhere. There has to be something we missed."
Dragon turned to him. The Cawthorne's face didn't show any emotion, unlike her 3D-rendered avatar. "Be careful. If the ship teleports again and takes you with it…"
So far, the ship had only teleported once, and it had been back to the spot it had come from. The Man Who Would Be King had only appeared when he'd been near it (though it could've been the lizard's fault). The not-trigger disorientation he'd experienced had happened on the ship.
Whatever was happening to him, he had the suspicion he'd find some sort of answer onboard.
"I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? We both know you have the tendency to get too focused on things."
If he'd been a more sentimental man, maybe he would've walked up to the mech's chest, put a hand over where he knew Dragon would be entombed. Instead, he looked into the Cawthorne's eyes, meeting hers through the cameras.
"Trust me," he said. "I know what I'm doing, and what I'm doing is going back in."
The Cawthorne just nodded with a whirr of machinery.
There were no changes in the engine room, he verified. No changes in the cockpit, any sort of indication that the teleportation was done from inside the ship. No changes in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden…
He walked into one of the storage areas, and-
…What?
How?
Dazed, he walked inside. He'd tentatively ruled out time manipulation earlier but, right then, he felt like he was walking into the past.
Wall to wall, the room was covered with his old gear and tools.
To an outside observer, they might not have been able to notice the similarities between the slightly-too-small silver and purple armor and his own, or the rack of quarterstaves and his halberd.
To him, though, he knew his tech better than the back of his hand. After all, he hadn't spent hours upon hours of time and focus each week with his flesh splayed open, trying to find a way to make everything just a little more compact so he could fit in a fifth or sixth function.
And this? This was his tech.
The moment of disorientation–had the ship read information from his power, somehow? Or had it targeted what he had on his person, extrapolated from those? No, there weren't any copies of Dragon's drones.
He was certain that this was copied from his own tech, but he sat down and pulled one of the purple visors from a rack. It was almost completely identical to the ones he'd tried giving out to his strike squad back when he'd been more willing to make and maintain tech for other people. Other than the color and the comms frequency, it could've been something he'd made with his own hands.
The rest was all of a similar caliber. Tech he could've made in the first five or so years of his career. Well, there was a difference, one that became more apparent as he searched. Each piece of tech just had more crammed into it. While his own equipment had years of development that this assortment didn't, nearly everything in the armory had him beat at his own game.
Whatever the ship had done, it had plagiarized from him, and it had done it better than him. He took a deep breath and unclenched his jaw before it could give him a tension headache. As much as he wanted to shout and rage and break every goddamn copy in this place, he didn't.
He still got some measure of satisfaction from stepping on the disassembled visor on the way out.
Not using The Man Who Would Be King's extra hands was proving to be more of a nuisance than Armsmaster would've liked. The phantasm felt like just another part of his body, so keeping it unsummoned was like keeping one arm held behind his back at all times.
Beyond the potential threat it might pose, though, there was also the task of keeping it hidden while he was in his civilian identity. He'd already had one close call while he was at his favorite hole-in-the-wall café, where he'd grabbed for his phone while already holding his knife and fork. Small mercy that he was the only one who could see the wireframe arm reaching across the table.
The 48-hour moratorium on the ship had passed on Tuesday, and he'd gotten stuck in with a vengeance. If it was moved, it returned to its original spot after 24 hours. If it or anything that came with it was broken, they repaired after the same amount of time.
That meant any and all destructive reverse-engineering was on the board, as long as they didn't set off any hidden countermeasures. He relished this fact, much to Dragon's exasperation.
On Thursday morning, there was yet another incident. He'd only learned about it several hours after the fact, but according to Gallant, a completely unknown cape had teleported into his classroom.
The unknown cape, 'Sans', had thankfully been cooperative. Well, mostly–apparently, he was convinced that he was a video game character. Whether he was insane, lying, or a power-construct made by a fan of that game was still unknown.
Other people had done most of the talking with him, but Armsmaster was now being called in to use his lie detector. He'd read through the previous interview transcripts beforehand, and he had a list of questions to verify.
He walked into the room and sat down in front of the skeleton. Sans was a skeleton in the same way a dog was a wolf. His proportions were off, the shape of his skull too cartoonish. There were heavy bags under his eye sockets and when he blinked, his bone moved like flesh.
"You'd be Sans the Skeleton?" Armsmaster asked.
Sans was reclining in the interview chair, one arm slung over the back, but his eyes (eyesockets?) were sharp.
"that's me. so, what's got you looking so blue?" The skeleton winked.
"I'm Armsmaster, leader of the local Protectorate branch," he said, ignoring the joke. "I'm here to ask you a few questions."
"well, i guess you do have a greater-than-average number of arms."
Was he talking about The M- no, the average number of arms would be less than two, thanks to amputees. Armsmaster gave him a flat look.
"tough crowd," Sans muttered.
Instead of responding, Armsmaster held up his phone, a video already playing on it.
The light in Sans' eyes flickered out for a moment, then returned. "yep."
"Do you have a place to stay?"
"nope." Truth. "mind if I stay at yours?"
"That's fine." The PHQ was hardly lacking in spare living quarters. With that out of the way, Armsmaster started asking questions.
"You believe you're from the video game 'Undertale', right? That you're the character 'Sans the Skeleton' and that you lived his life before arriving on Earth Bet."
"that's me." Truth.
Or, at least he believed it was. The lie detector didn't have access to some database of universal truths, it just used facial expression and speech patterns to determine how honest a person was being. Sans' face and voice were close enough to human that he had no reason to suspect it shouldn't work on him.
"And you were brought here through, quote, 'someone summoning you with their magic science powers'."
"yep." Truth.
"Can you elaborate?"
"i can."
Armsmaster waited for several seconds.
"Elaborate, then," he asked.
"so there's a person in this world. and they have magic science powers. and they used them to summon me here." Truth.
Was he being intentionally frustrating? Almost certainly.
"Does the person in question have a cape identity?"
"well, they don't moonlight as a piece of cloth. unless you count doormats? heh." Truth.
"I'll be blunt. How much information are you going to be willing to tell me about them?"
"eh, their business is their business. i'm not about to tattle on them if they don't want it." Truth.
"Even though they, from your perspective, kidnapped you?"
"ehh, sorta. not like they can control their power." True, and deeply concerning. "besides, if i wouldn't have agreed to coming along, the power would've found a version of me that did."
So, this power could bring fictional characters to life, but the user didn't have any control over who it took.
…Or what it took?
"Do you know who or what else they summoned?" Sans took a breath, and Armsmaster interrupted before he could speak. "Don't bother if you're not willing to tell me."
"sure, i love being asked not to do things." Truth, not that it was very useful.
"But, hypothetically, if the power attempted to summon an object instead of a character…"
"i can give you that one. yep, they can grab items too." Truth.
"And if I asked if they summoned, say, a spaceship?"
"i'd make a joke instead of answering." Truth. But the fact he'd evaded the question was telling. It wasn't definitive proof that he and the ship were connected by any means, of course, but the pieces fit together.
"If the person who summoned you can't control their power, what happens if they get something dangerous?" Armsmaster asked, leaning forward. "People can and will get hurt. You claim that you're not human, but can you stand by when people are at risk of dying?"
"buddy," Sans sighed and ran a gloved hand over where his scalp should be "i've already done that. i stood by and watched as a human killed nearly everyone i knew because of a promise i made. they killed my brother, and i still couldn't bring myself to act because they hadn't hunted people down as thoroughly as they could've." Truth.
"You just did nothing?" Armsmaster asked, disbelieving. "And you're just going to repeat that mistake?" How the hell anyone could just stand by while innocents were getting hurt and not be a monster was beyond him.
"sometimes it's just hard to care about things, yanno?" Sans answered. Truth. The bags under his eyes seemed deeper than they had been before. "i'm glad you can get worked up enough to do something, but that ain't me. guess that's why i shouldn't make promises, huh?"
Armsmaster grit his teeth. "If you were scared, maybe I could understand that. But this? How could you sleep at night, knowing you let a tragedy happen and didn't do anything because you just didn't care enough? Because you made a 'promise'? If you think you're a good person, you might want to reconsider."
"how about you? do you think you're a good person?"
…What?
"What?" He hissed.
He was about to keep speaking, to launch into a righteous fury, when Sans spoke again.
"maybe i should rephrase." The light in Sans' eyes vanished, leaving only dark, empty sockets. "H o w m a n y p e o p l e h a v e y o u k i l l e d?"
Armsmaster blinked. He had killed people, of course. The start of his career was defined by being sent out to arrest or eliminate some of the worse threats the country had to offer. Was the skeleton a Thinker, or was it just throwing shit at the wall in an attempt to find something that got under his skin?
"I killed because it was necessary," he snapped. "Because it would make the world a better place. Maybe if you'd done the same, less of your species would've died."
"probably," Sans shrugged, his eyes lighting up again. "i'm not saying you don't need to kill sometimes. heck, my old boss killed a few people. monsterkind were planning to go to war." Truth.
…Was he delusional enough to want to continue a fictional war? Ideally, no. He didn't seem to have any interest in fighting, for better or for worse, and that would include fighting the rest of humanity.
He continued. "just… watch out. the more you kill, the easier it is to kill again, yanno? a level of violence of six ain't looking too good for you." Truth, or at least an indication that he believed what he was saying. His eyes went dark. "How long until 'necessary' goes from 'necessary to protect people' to 'necessary for your own self-benefit'? Until 'making the world a better place' becomes 'making your world a better place'?"
"Unless you have experience in making the hard decisions," Armsmaster snarled, "I would advise you to listen to the people with experience. If you weren't too fucking apathetic to care, maybe I'd talk about innocent people dying. About, over and over again, watching the news, seeing people dying in my city, gunned down by the crossfire of a gang conflict or killed for someone's initiation into a white supremacist group. About seeing civilians pop like rotten balloons because of someone who could turn into a living plague. About how I saw a villain hold up the mangled corpse of a seven-year-old like a fucking trophy, so I had to put her down before she could kill again. You think you can fucking talk?!"
To punctuate his words, he slammed his hands on the desk.
A wall of artificially symmetrical bones shot up from the floor.
"woah there, pal, careful. i'm fragile." Truth. Sans' posture was relaxed as always, but his ever-present grin was forced, and his eyes had a wariness to them.
Armsmaster put space between him and the monster, keeping one pair of eyes fixed on him while the other glanced around the room for any hidden attacks ready to spear him.
"funky-looking soul you got there," Sans commented, looking behind him.
Soul? He turned halfway around, enough to keep the monster in his peripheral vision. The Man Who Would Be King was hovering behind him, surveying the room. Inside its chest was a red heart the size of a softball, linked by thin red strings to the rest of its wireframe body.
"(guess it's my job to give you a tutorial, huh?) that heart is your soul, the very culmination of your being," Sans explained. "its what monsters target with our attacks. dunno what the rest is, but it's also part of your soul." He believed it.
'Soul' must be his name for some sort of psychic construct, then. There were other capes like that–Voodoo, Breakpoint–who'd create something to serve as a weak spot on their victims.
"You gonna fight me?" Armsmaster asked, slowly drawing his halberd from his back.
"hey, you were the one who got violent first," Sans said. Truth. "s'not like i have game mechanics protecting me any more. i can't just set up a shop to avoid being hurt."
Armsmaster peeled his hand from his weapon. "So, you can see this thing? But you don't know what it is."
"yep," Sans said. "it's part of you, like the rest of your body, so you don't gotta look so scared about it." Truth.
"Do you know who gave it to me, then?"
"nah, i wouldn't have any ideas you weren't already thinking. it's just part of you now, so even if i had a bunch of my old lab equipment, i wouldn't be able to do magical traceback on it or anything."
Truth.
Shit.
A Trump had targeted him, most likely the same cape who'd brought Sans here, who'd also probably summoned the spaceship. Someone whose power was completely out of their control.
Not a Trump like Teacher was. One like Pastor from Freedom, California or Maid Manifest from Flint, Michigan. Permanent power-granters. Permanent power-granters that worked on people who were already capes.
Freedom and Flint had both been quarantined.
If this could be replicated, what was going to happen to Brockton Bay?
The sound of murmuring rose as the service ended and people filed out in groups of two or three. He was one of the first to leave, quietly slipping through the doors to head to the parking lot.
How many years had it been since he'd last been in a church? His mother's funeral had been… '09? So, two years, give or take.
He had nearly not attended that one, too.
Out of the crowd, he was the only one who hadn't brought a car for the procession. All he had was his personal motorbike. It was sturdy and reliable, even if it had accumulated damage over the years. Eventually, it'd be replaced by a newer model, but for now, it was his.
The procession stopped. There were very few parking spots left, but after a few circles of the area, he found one between two wider cars that he could fit in. He flipped the bike's kickstand and walked to where the rest of the group had gathered.
There was someone wailing near the head of the group. He grimaced. There were other people who could deal with her better than he could, at least right at that moment–he was going to be doing what he could to assist later.
It didn't make the horrible feeling of helplessness sting less.
A creaking sound approached him, and he turned. James–a different James from the one being rolled out of the hearse–wheeled up to him.
"James," he greeted, "it's been a while."
The other man gave a pained smile. "It's been a long time since you last called me 'Dad'."
"We're both adults, now," he replied. "If you wanted to be my father, you should've started when I was ten years old, alone at home, with nobody to talk to but my journal."
James looked away, the remnants of the attempted smile dropping from his face. "You're making the same mistakes I did, though, aren't you? You're, what, thirty-four now? And you already have white hairs growing in."
"Thirty-five," he corrected, "and having my life consumed by my job is part of the reason I didn't try to start a family."
Were those tears glistening in James' eyes? He turned away to let the man preserve some dignity.
"At least if you did," James said, "when you're a bloody broken-down old man like me, you'd have a child to talk to."
"And that child would be just as distant from me as I am from you," he replied.
James sighed, and his wheelchair creaked as he leaned back in it. "I'm guessing that this is absolutely vital work that you can't ease up on without serious consequences?" Rhetorical question. Even if the other man didn't know him, he knew himself, and he knew the traits he would've passed down to him.
"I'm an investigator and Watchdog liaison for the PRT." Lie. He'd wanted a cover as a PRT technician, but it was easier to create a cover where he'd finished his psychology degree and changed it to a criminal psychology degree instead of inventing a whole new engineering qualification.
James just sighed again, looking as tired as he felt.
"If I slacked off," he continued, "people would die. Innocent people." Truth. Every hour he didn't spend at work was one more possible tragedy he could've prevented, one more horrible aftermath he'd have to stand in the wake of, unable to do a goddamn thing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw James rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "And one day, Colin, you'll be-"
"-A bloody broken-down old man like you," he interrupted, "but at least I'd be a broken-down old man in a slightly better world." More lies. Even if he somehow survived to be an old man, there wasn't some mythical point where the monsters would stop attacking, where everything would reach a peaceful utopia and all the world's problems would be fixed.
James just shook his head, silent.
The distant sobbing turned to shrieking, and James twitched as the girl cried out for the boy who'd been named after him. "That poor young lady," he muttered. "Her whole family…"
Killed by a villain.
Echolalia, who'd traveled to Boston from Brockton Bay only months before. A petty thief with an insensitively-chosen name.
He couldn't have known to do anything. Her group hadn't been killers. Prioritizing attacks on the Empire 88 had been the logical move.
This was one of the other reasons he hadn't considered starting a family. Easier to stay objective about things, this way. Less to use against him.
The crowd undulated as several people pulled a screaming, thrashing girl back from where the coffins were being lowered into the ground. It took several minutes for her shouting to break back down into weeping.
This was a mistake. He shouldn't have come here. He couldn't be the one who dealt with this. All he'd do was hurt her more.
But he was going to have to be. Even if James–the girl's uncle–had been in a position to take care of a child, he didn't think he'd have a choice then, either.
Too many times, he'd been stuck in the fallout of a catastrophe, the inability to help burning him from the inside out.
He'd be damned if he was going to let it happen again.
He'd had doubts since the moment he'd made his decision, and the look on the social worker's–Mary Silver's–face was only making them stronger.
"I do wish there was someone better for this, but…" she trailed off.
"I'm aware that I'm far from an ideal caregiver," he said, "but I'm both her closest able-bodied relative and the one who lives nearest to her. Besides, with her 18th birthday so soon, she wouldn't need to stay with me for very long."
The girl's parents had left her both their house and a sizable inheritance, so he'd hardly be throwing her in the deep end when she became an adult and moved out again.
"But if she enrolls in a new school in Brockton Bay to finish her education-"
"-Then I'd be able to house her until the end of the school year."
Her face grew a little sadder. "Please, don't look at this like a puzzle to be solved. Ms Steele is a child, a grieving one. She doesn't just need a place to stay, she needs support, someone who can help her through these difficult times."
"Like you said, there's no better option. With her outbursts, she can't stay with James Wallis, and you said yourself that she'd do poorly in foster care. It's the best we're going to get."
He knew the benefits of small improvements better than anyone. Of facing down an insurmountable enemy and being just a little bit faster, having gear that's just a little bit better than it could've been.
"I know, I know, but…" Ms Silver rubbed her temples. "I just fear for Brianne's wellbeing."
"So do I," he said. He also knew better than anyone that he'd make a poor parental figure.
She sighed and stood up. "I suppose you'd better get the chance to speak to her."
He stood too and followed her through the building's unfamiliar halls.
Brianne Steele swiped an arm across her eyes as they walked into the room. It didn't hide the fact that her face was blotchy, or the fact that the hand holding her phone was shaking.
"Miss Steele," Ms Silver said gently, "this is Mr Wallis. He's going to be your caregiver for the next few months."
Brianne glared up at him, and he met her eyes. After several seconds, she looked away again.
"I can't say that I'll be as supportive as others might've been," he said, "but I can give you a place to stay until you're ready to move out on your own."
More time passed, half a minute or so, before she gave a tight nod.
Hannah had been kind enough to help him set up the spare room in his apartment for Brianne's use. He'd moved his boxes into his own bedroom and set up some flat-packed furniture in the ex-storage room.
He adjusted his backpack as Brianne looked around the room.
"It's small," she said.
"It's what I have."
She grit her teeth and started to unpack her belongings.
It was clear that she wasn't happy with the situation. That was a no-brainer. If Hannah were still over, would she be able to cheer the girl up? Maybe, maybe not. Point was, he certainly didn't know how.
Brianne fumbled with her computer, trying to get everything plugged in to the right places.
"...Need any help with that?" He asked. If nothing else, tech was something he could easily assist with.
"No. Go away," she snapped.
"Fine," he said, walking out of the room.
"And don't come back! I don't want to fucking be here, and the less I have to see your stupid face, the better!" She yelled after him.
"You'd prefer to be in foster care?" He asked. There was no response. "If you don't want me around, fine. I've been over the laws surrounding this, and while I can't be absent all the time, I can legally spend large periods of time away from here, at your age."
"I'd better not see you until next Saturday, then," she said.
"That's fine." The maximum was a month, so once a week would be reasonable.
In fact, that was a relief. He didn't have to make anything more than minor changes in his schedule, so there'd be much less risk of a crisis starting while he was occupied with her. Best of both worlds - the trolley had been moved onto a third track, so to speak.
"I-"
He turned back to Brianne, who'd taken a step towards him. "Hm? Do you need something?"
Her eyes narrowed and she turned away. "I need you to leave."
"I am."
He left the apartment, feeling Brianne's gaze on his back. The backpack was left unopened, until he arrived back at the PHQ and put the helmet inside back on its armor stand.
Even if she hadn't asked him to spend time elsewhere, perhaps telling her his other identity would've been a bad idea, anyway. Her family had been killed by a Tinker, and there was a very real chance she'd blame him for not stopping the villain as much as he blamed himself.
Colin balled up the plastic bags and dropped them in the trash.
"You're not keeping those?" Brianne needled.
"Why would I?" He asked. "There's no reason to have them take up space just on the off chance I'll need them."
"Come on, what kind of an adult are you if you don't have a plastic bag filled with other plastic bags? My parents had three of those things."
"I'm not your parents," he said patiently. "I prefer to live more efficiently, and that means not keeping things I don't need."
"You aren't my parents," she snarled, "because my parents would've at least tried to sympathize."
This was going to go swimmingly, he was sure.
"If you wanted support, why didn't you just ask?" Not that he would've been any good at giving it, but he could've tried.
"Fucking when? You're never around!" She shouted.
"At your request," he ground out. "You were the one who asked me to go away, remember?"
She set her jaw and looked away.
When she didn't reply, he took a breath and continued. "You're being irrational. You're expecting me to be something that I'm not, while acting in a way that would actively discourage that."
"Well- I- I'm allowed to be irrational! I'm allowed to want my parents to not be fucking dead!"
"And that won't be allowed forever," he said. "It was a terrible thing that happened, but you're going to have to get over it eventually. You don't need your parents to become someone."
Wrong thing to say.
Brianne's eyes went wild with fury, and she charged at him, screaming something unintelligible. As dour as the thought was, at least he knew how to deal with this. He dodged her first wild swing and caught her arm, pushing her onto the ground in an armlock.
"I would recommend not doing that again," he snapped. "Right now, my patience is wearing thin. I'm doing you a favor by letting you stay here. Don't squander it."
No. He should at least try to be the bigger person here. He stood up, and she shot to the other side of the room, breathing hard.
"Do you want me to stay or leave?" He asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
"Fuck off," she panted.
"And you do mean it, this time?"
"I mean it! Fuck off!"
He did.
One of the neighbors, who'd heard the shouting, was standing outside. A brief explanation of the situation made the man leave, shooting one last worried look towards his apartment. He felt the same, if for different reasons.
He shouldn't have done this, and now, it was too late to go back on it.
Dragon tapped her chin. "It sounds like you tried to approach things from a more logical point of view when what she needed was an emotional one."
"Everything I said was true," he spoke around the wrench in his mouth as he screwed the last panel back into place. "You think I should've lied to her?"
"I think you should've approached things more softly," she said. "From what I can tell, she was too proud to admit to a stranger that she did actually want you to comfort her. You barged right through that, hit her directly in the dignity."
If she didn't want me to do that, she should've used a better argument, he didn't say. Even he knew that wouldn't go over well.
"You can't relate to that at all?" She asked.
He put down his screwdriver, pulled the wrench from his mouth, and carefully started tightening the bolts. "That's different. She's a woman, she's allowed to be emotional."
"Colin! That's-" Dragon took a breath. "...We'll talk about toxic masculinity and gender roles later. We're talking about something else, right now."
"What? It's what society expects of-"
"Later."
He sighed. That wasn't going to be a fun conversation to have.
"Does she have any friends at school?" Dragon asked.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've tried to be hands-off, like she asked. I didn't want to pry when she clearly didn't- when she clearly didn't seem to want to talk to me."
"So, in the worst-case scenario, she has no support system at all, right now. She tried reaching out to you to get what she was missing, and you rebuffed her."
"Not on purpose. She-"
"-hadn't communicated her issues well enough, I know. But, from her perspective, she tried to reach out, and you rejected it."
Hell of a way to 'reach out'. He didn't say that one, either.
"What should I do, then?" He asked instead.
"You know, I'm not exactly a people-person, either. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this."
He looked over his halberd. Everything seemed to be in order there, at least, so he put it back on the rack with the others. Dragon gave him a look when he swept his tools onto the floor and kicked his feet up on his workbench.
"I'd be surprised if you were a people-person–you wouldn't exactly have much experience talking to people in person."
He regretted saying that even before she gave an awkward half-smile.
"Geez, I'm sorry," he muttered. Good job, Colin.
"It's fine, really," she said, not that it made things fine.
"Either way," he said, pulling away from that topic, "I trust your judgment. It'd take a lot to be worse than I am at talking to people."
She snorted slightly.
"Well," she said, "I think you should just try to follow her lead on this. If she doesn't want to bring the argument up, don't bring it up. If she does, apologize. Try to sympathize with her."
"Trying to follow her lead is what got me into this situation."
"See what I mean about not being a people person?" Dragon joked.
"Well, it's better than whatever I would've come up with."
There was a lull in the conversation.
"So," Dragon spoke up, "how is your nanobranch disintegration technology coming along?"
"Well, I've been having a bit of an issue with…"
Brianne flinched when he entered the kitchen, which was an excellent sign about how this was going to go.
"Morning," he said.
Her replying "Morning" was flat, emotionless, a stark contrast to the anger that had been simmering under the surface every time he'd seen her previously.
"You planning to put away the shopping?" He asked after a moment. Stupid question, of course she was. Why else would she be putting away the shopping as they spoke?
"Mm."
As he spoke, at least.
What should he say, though? What could he say that wouldn't make things worse?
"You have any homework to do?" He tried.
She shook her head and got back to sorting out the groceries. With no better ideas, he just watched her from the kitchen doorway. She didn't seem to want to broach the topic of the argument, so he didn't either.
Brianne turned to the refrigerator to put the carrots in the vegetable drawer, and her face looked red. Was she embarrassed? He didn't think so. She seemed more jumpy, if anything.
"Everything alright?" He asked. "You look a bit flushed."
"'M fine," she muttered.
Was she sick? He touched a hand to her forehead. Warm, much warmer than regular body heat.
She flinched away from his hand. Did she think he was going to fight her again? He'd only done that because she'd tried to attack him first. All he'd done was de-escalate.
"Brianne, you're feverish," he clarified. "Did you catch something?"
Finally, she turned to look at him, staring at his face for several seconds. Assessing him to see if he was a threat? Her expression, like her voice, was deliberately flat. The glimmer of fear in her eyes was still obvious.
"Do you have any other symptoms?" He added.
"Tiredness?" Her voice came out as a question rather than a statement, like she was asking even herself if it was true.
Something had happened, whether it was the argument or whatever was going on with her at school. Something had happened, and now, she was acting differently. Acting scared, as if she was expecting to have to bolt at any moment.
Why had she reacted like that? What could've caused-
He remembered the helmet he'd neglected to show her, the explanation he'd been planning to give about serial powers and second generation capes.
…Oh.
Shit.
And if the argument–if he–had been the one to cause it…
"I see," he said with a nod, his throat dry. "In that case, get some bed rest, and I'll check back on you tomorrow." Ideally, she'd take the concern as proof he wasn't planning to restart the argument.
As for the day-long break… he needed time to think. Research. He still had access to those Parahuman Studies PDFs, didn't he?
"Thanks," she murmured, relieved. Good, things were going… not as poorly as they could've been.
This had all been a terrible idea.
If his fears were right, then there was a very real chance of her going out to pick a fight, whether as a hero or as...
Or to scavenge for parts, if she'd gotten a variation of his power.
"Thank me by looking after yourself," he said.
Should he call her out? His guess might not even be correct. She hadn't been checked for a corona pollentia–as notoriously difficult as it was to tell the difference between an active one and an inactive one with regular technology, it'd be important to know if she even just had the potential to trigger. Hell, she'd only lived with him for three weeks, and they'd only interacted for a few hours, maybe. This was all just conjecture.
He'd keep it vague, then–she was definitely using the tiredness as an excuse for something, so he could work with that.
"And," he said, "if you want to tell me what's actually going on, I'd be ready to hear you out."
She went still. Bullseye, it seemed.
There wasn't anything he could think of saying that he didn't suspect wouldn't make things worse, so he just walked out of the room, a storm of worries spinning through his mind.
He'd been planning to relax over the weekend. Give his body time to recover, catch up on the shows he hadn't had time to watch during the past few weeks. The city's villain elements had been in a lull of activity, so it was time he could afford himself.
With the realization that he could've been a major factor in a trigger event… There wasn't much he could do other than throw himself into his work, let the altered state of mind his power brought distract him from his worries.
Procrastination through Tinker stuff. At least it was a productive sort of procrastination, as much of an oxymoron as that was.
Dragon had been disappointed that their plans to watch the latest episode of C.R.U.X together had fallen through, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her why.
It had just been the practical decision to make, not telling her. If it came out that he had contributed to a new cape's trigger event, that would be disastrous for him. That's why he didn't say anything. If there had been a tightness in his chest at the thought of admitting it, it was just because of the potential PR trouble. That was all.
Even after losing track of time and spending the entire night working, the next day came all too soon.
Despite the fact he'd trained himself to push past momentary hesitation a long time ago, combat was a whole different ball game compared to social interaction. Still, he turned the key and walked into the apartment after only a short pause.
Brianne was as jumpy as she had been the previous day. She'd frozen when he'd taken her temperature, and she'd kept her distance from him as much as she'd been able to without making it obvious. He'd let her move away–experience and PR training had taught him that he should let her have her space.
He hadn't apologized yesterday, and he regretted letting it slip his mind. Should he do it now? Save it until she seemed ready to talk about it? It's not like he knew what 'seemed ready to talk about it' would even look like.
Right now would have to suffice. He'd have to be careful about this. Charging straight ahead without putting more than a moment's thought into what he was saying wasn't going to work out.
Best to start simple.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She blinked. It seemed she hadn't expected him to apologize.
When it became apparent that she didn't have anything to say, he continued. "I've been thinking about what I said last week. While I still stand by the points I made, I worded them poorly, and some of the things I said weren't necessary at all."
There. That was the truth. No excuses or justifications.
Brianne stared at the floor, chewing over her words. She eventually settled on mumbling "S'fine. Rather not think about it."
Fuck.
Fifteen years ago, he hadn't wanted to think about things, either.
(He still didn't.)
There was a chance this was confirmation bias. Trauma was hardly exclusive to capes, no matter how much it felt like it with the company he tended to keep. Still, with that chance becoming slimmer and slimmer, he wasn't going to risk that.
"If what we said was so bad to you that you can't even think about it a week later," he said, "then it's exactly the sort of thing I'm worried about."
She winced, still not meeting his eyes. What had he done? Was it the tone? He thought he was trying to express sympathy, show that he'd been worried for her. Had that not come across, or did she just not want it?
Did she think he was lying?
Damnation. This was why he tried to avoid this sort of situation.
She shook her head. "Save it?" She asked, with a horrible pleading tone that made him want to leave the apartment and bury himself in Tinker work again.
But, she was trying to put things off. To avoid explaining. That meant she had something to hide. If that something was a power, then the chance she'd run off to start using it was very, very high.
If everything went well, she'd join the Wards, and she'd get the backup she'd need to avoid making a stupid mistake and getting killed. Or, Protectorate, rather–her 18th birthday was in less than a month.
Things weren't going well, though.
The helmet in his backpack felt like a ball of lead.
He'd save the explanation for later.
"On one condition. Don't put yourself in danger." It was the best he was going to get.
"...I won't."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
Good. There was no guarantee she'd keep her word, of course, but it was better than nothing.
"Just…" he said, then stopped. He'd have to think through his words carefully, here. Dragon had advised him to sympathize with her. He could do that, or at least try.
What would he have wanted to hear, fifteen years ago?
"Things get better," he said, "even if it doesn't feel like it. I was never particularly close with my own parents, so I don't know what it's like, but I think I know enough to get a general picture."
Finally, she looked up at him, attentive. She was listening. Did that make it better or worse?
"It's not easy," he continued, "but you find ways to get away from it. Ways to become the sort of person that'll never be in a situation like that again."
In a way, she had it easier than him. Echolalia was in prison and, if she ever broke out again, Brianne could legally beat the shit out of her.
Not that he'd openly advise her to do that, of course.
For the first time since he saw her at the funeral, she smiled. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
Good. Good. There was still next week to contend with but, right at that moment, things hadn't gone south.
Things moved to less dangerous topics from there and, soon, he was out the door. His backpack had, once again, remained closed.
Colin stared at his reflection, sweat dripping down his brow. Not out of vanity, even if he knew he was conventionally attractive enough for an outsider to make that mistake.
There was more gray in his hair than he remembered. While he had a bottle of hair dye that he used on his beard every once in a while, he'd never bothered to use it anywhere else. No point, really, with how few people would be seeing it.
Graying generally started in a person's thirties, but not to that degree. Was it just stress, or was there a genetic component? Knowing his parents, he could hardly use them as a control group, either.
Scars, too, were something he'd accumulated over time. He could see half a dozen of them and, if he turned around, he'd see a dozen more.
The one curving down from behind his ear was from his early days, before he'd added a helmet to his visor. In fact, that had been the reason why–both to avoid future blows like that and to preserve his image as an unshakeable, reliable hero. At least none of the scars he'd accumulated since then were on his lower face.
There was a claw mark that ran along his collar bone. A pair of horizontal surgical scars, older than the rest, one under each pectoral. An uneven scar along his upper left arm from when one of his pauldrons had shattered–he'd spent the next several hours with jagged metal stabbing into his arm before he got medical assistance.
As much as some of the other veterans in this war against villainy took pride in their scars, all they were to him was a constant physical reminder that he hadn't been good enough, that other people would see them and know that he hadn't been good enough as well.
Panacea had never healed them, or even offered to. Most likely, she thought he was one of the former type of veterans rather than the latter. He could've requested it himself, and she likely would've done it, he suspected, but asking would've been too much of a blow to his pride to consider.
He stepped away from the mirror and into the shower to wash off the sweat from his workout. Since it was a Sunday morning, he'd been doing upper body strength workouts–curls, pullups, deadlifting, etcetera. He'd had another shot at beating his weight record for deadlifting, but he hadn't succeeded.
The record had been in place for three years and four months, now.
He wasn't anywhere near close to beating it again. Time was marching onward. His physical prime was behind him, and his tech was stagnating.
When the explosive growth at the beginning of his career had started to slow, he'd turned to working on his own body, finding his own fighting style instead of relying on his tech to emulate higher skill levels. He'd started on a more rigorous workout routine and stuck to it religiously.
It was only a small gap between what he used to be able to do and what he could do now. But, a gap was still a gap, and it was only going to get wider.
He turned off the shower, toweled off, and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans. Ironically, the shirt was an Armsmaster-brand one from the gift shop that Assault had gotten him as a joke, but he wasn't about to turn down a free shirt.
The clothing tag scratched at the back of his neck, so he stuck a hand back to readjust it. His fingers brushed against a raised patch of skin on the back of his left shoulder, which was strange, because he knew he didn't have a scar there. What-
His work phone started to ring. Urgent call.
Colin picked it up and listened. Three minutes later, Armsmaster rushed out the door.
If someone had crossed a beige RV with a particularly brutalist-looking building and turned it into a spaceship, it might look something like what was sitting in front of him. The thing was over half the length of a football field, large enough that the entirety of the Statue of Liberty could fit inside from toe to torch if the ship was hollowed out.
There were guns mounted on the front–simple ballistic weaponry, from a cursory investigation–and thrusters on the back and sides. Neither showed any signs of being used, whether for testing or actually moving the damned thing over to where it had been found.
In fact, it looked newly made, as if it was fresh from a factory. Not a single scuff had marred the ship's hull, not even where the landing gear should've scraped against the concrete when it set down. The only marks on it were from the PRT's handling of it, barely noticeable micro-scratches.
None of the detritus around the ship had been disturbed, either - no cracks in the ground from its landing, no pebbles blown away by the air currents, nothing. It had been moved into a hastily hired-out warehouse since, with Vista shrinking it enough for a PRT van to carry it, but he'd seen it at the original site.
So, there were three options. One was that a group of Tinkers had somehow snuck bulk amounts of tools and materials through a public area for weeks, slowly building a giant fucking spaceship while not a single person noticed.
The other, much less implausible options were that it had either been created wholesale by a power or transported here through other means. While a teleporter accident was technically possible, Armsmaster was leaning towards it being artificially made–the ship had zero signs of any scuffing or similar that would happen if it had been constructed normally.
Unfortunately, conjecture was conjecture, and the PRT had rules about not disassembling technically harmless advanced technology made by unknown Tinkers unless the tinker was confirmed to be dead. The rule was logical in most cases, put in place to avoid alienating new capes by having a hero break apart their stuff. In this case, it was doing more harm than good.
"ETA?" He asked.
"Twenty-six minutes until the Cawthorne arrives. If I hadn't loaded it down with tools, I'd be here in twelve," Dragon replied.
It was rare for him to get the chance to spend time with Dragon in person, and even rarer that it would be outside an Endbringer battle. He was looking forward to it, even if there'd be several feet of metal and technology between her and the outside world.
"And Cache?"
"He'll be boarding a plane from New York the day after next. He should arrive shortly after the moratorium on captured Tinker technology ends."
It was a shame that he wouldn't have the time to properly look into the ship. From the few non-destructive scans he'd been able to do, the thing was loaded down with advanced machinery. It didn't have the markers of parahuman-generated materials, either, which was a point against the theory that a cape had materialized it from nothing.
By the time 48 hours had passed and he'd be allowed to start pulling the thing apart, Cache would be there to take it to a remote location, where Tinkers with more fitting specializations would look at it.
While he could've and had collaborated with other tinkers on larger projects, his power tended more towards personal combat equipment. Being the highest-ranked Tinker in the Protectorate and the person who's city the ship had appeared in didn't mean he'd be the best one to work on it.
There was a faint scrabbling sound from his left.
"Hey, Halbeard," a high-pitched, synthesized voice spoke. "Nice dick compensator."
He spun to face the voice, weapon in hand.
A robotic-looking chameleon, ten or so inches in length, was strutting towards the ship. On the screens that covered most of its body, it displayed patterns that resembled the uniform of a Japanese ninja. Its tail was tipped with an electrical plug, which was dragging across the ground behind it.
He'd taken two steps towards it when one of its eyes swiveled to meet his. It squawked and bolted, screeching "I take it back WoG said your dick is fine!"
The grappling hook he fired at the robot barely missed it, but he was still hot on its heels. It was a slippery fucker, swerving past him whenever he thought he nearly had it cornered.
Damn it all, why was his combat analyser being so useless?
Snarling, he swung his halberd at it. The hit landed more than a foot from the creature.
The wireframe bec de corbin–an elongated spear-hammer–that had appeared just a moment later hit an inch from its power plug tail.
What the hell…?
In his distraction, the lizard had escaped, scampering away while nobody else even attempted to stop it.
He looked down. A second pair of arms made from the same green, glowing wireframe hovered just over his normal arms. He could feel each of them, the faint wind blowing through the gaps in the new armored hands. When he lifted the bec de corbin from the hole it had left in the ground, the hammer head was filled in with concrete.
More and more of the wireframe pulled forth from his body, unspooling into a silhouette. His vision doubled, one pair of eyes staring at the apparition's draconic helm, while the other gazed back at his own shocked expression. One pair of feet remained planted on the ground, while the other hovered just above it, claw-tips scraping against the floor.
People were staring. At him, or at the head of the weapon, but none of them were looking directly at the apparition itself.
"Who-" he swallowed and straightened up. "Identify yourself."
He felt the apparition open its mouth of its own accord, inhaling with invisible lungs. With a foreign tongue and lips, it spoke.
"The Man Who Would Be King."
Electricity sensors–nothing. Heat vision–nothing. Infrared or ultraviolet–nothing. Spatial distortion, radiation, even gravity–nothing. No dice. The only thing other than his own eyes that had been able to sense The Man Who Would Be King was a psionic sensor he'd cobbled together out of frustration.
Dragon had been mostly occupied with the ship, but she'd occasionally chipped in with advice on psychic emissions when she was free. The scanner he'd ended up with had been unconventional for a psionics detector, but it had worked.
Even more irritating than that was the fact that, apparently, he'd been the only one who could see the lizard, too. Despite its appearance, it was probably some manner of psychic construct as well.
It and 'The Man Who Would Be King' weren't the only things only he had been able to see–he'd used scans of the latter to make a prototype psionic emitter, and he'd been able to perceive the emissions from that, too.
Beyond the lizard, there was no leads for what the hell had happened, or why the apparition had connected to him. It certainly wasn't volunteering any answers–even when he relinquished as much control over it as he could, it wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know.
Demanding information from it felt like demanding information from his arm or leg. There'd be no point, since they were a part of him.
Despite that, Master/Stranger protocols were still in place for him. The chances of this being benign were low. More likely for it to be a very strange Stranger trying to gather information, or a Master/Trump along the lines of Teacher or Pastor. He was to be under watch at all times, and Miss Militia would be acting head of the Protectorate ENE until further notice.
It was as necessary as it was galling.
Even with that, however, he'd tentatively been allowed back near the ship. The Man Who Would Be King's presence, as worrying as it was, was something he was determined to put to use. Though the ship was locked, he'd been able to phase the apparition through one of the walls and unlock it from the inside.
There'd been concern about him sending a potential enemy inside the piece of mostly unknown Tinker technology, but he'd been looking at scans of the thing anyway, so the apparition had almost certainly gotten details on it already. Still, he'd been allowed to explore deeper inside, as long as Dragon's drones followed him in.
The inside of the ship was practical, prioritizing utility over comfort, not dissimilar to his quarters back at the PHQ. It was definitely a living space, too–there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, even a small garden. If someone were to be trapped on the ship, they could've survived almost indefinitely.
In addition to the living and storage areas, there was the cockpit. While the ship's systems were still on lockdown, even the smallest lever or button had a physical label on it. If they were to be believed, his earlier comparison of this thing to a spaceship was right on the money. This vessel was built for long voyages through space, even if it seemingly hadn't been used. Yet.
Armsmaster stood in front of the door to the only room they hadn't investigated. The engine room. The door opened easily, and he and Dragon entered.
The engine room was the biggest on the ship, and yet had the least space to maneuver around in. Two giant machines took up the space–one with dozens of wires flowing out of it and one at the very back of the ship.
Him and Dragon set to work investigating the first of the two. There was only so much they could do, while destructive investigation was off the table, but that didn't mean they couldn't scan through the outer casing to get an idea of what was inside.
It was a fusion reactor, bigger than the ones he'd seen in other people's tech. A strangely built one, but not indecipherable. Like learning a language with no shared roots with English or Vietnamese, but one that was far simpler than either of them.
Dragon seemed to notice the strangeness, too, because she was becoming more and more focused on her work as time went on.
"Something wrong?" He asked, turning to her drones.
He could imagine her standing there instead, looking at the machine with a furrowed brow. She wasn't about to leave her suit, not with her mental condition, no matter how much he would've liked to speak with her in person.
Instead, her voice came through the speakers in his helmet. "It's hard to describe. If anything, it's like… when I first got my powers."
A red icon appeared in the top-right of his visor.
'Lie'.
…
Dragon deserved her privacy, no matter how curious he was. He surreptitiously turned the lie detector off and continued to listen.
"Before I had my breakthrough on how to reverse-engineer Tinker-made technology, I used regular technology as the basis of my suits. The way this power plant is constructed… it reminds me more of that than anything."
He raised an eyebrow. "So, what, you're saying this wasn't made by Tinkers?"
"I don't know. I can't figure out how it works from so little information, I was just going off how it was constructed. There's certain patterns, certain blind spots in Tinker tech that don't seem to be in this."
"So far, at least," he replied. "They could just be further in, or the Tinkers could've used normal technology for the outer layers of the reactor to cut down on the amount of building they needed to do."
She didn't reply. Her drones just kept circling around the reactor. He shrugged and moved on to the engine.
As his scans came in, though, he only grew more and more concerned. If he was understanding the engine right, then this ship wasn't just made for interplanetary journeys. It was for interstellar journeys.
This ship could go faster than light.
He didn't know-
-
Optimisation needed to work quickly. The warrior hub, previously their greatest ally, was now their biggest threat. They wouldn't die if it found them out, of course–even if they were corrupted, there was too much useful information to be extracted from them to be destroyed.
Any threat was to their host. Their secondary host, if such a being could be called 'secondary'.
The warrior itself was in a state of ennui, left without a purpose in a dead cycle. If it found out about their host, whether through the network or simply by having its avatar come close enough to her, its purpose of managing unforeseen elements in the cycle would be returned, and it would return to a more active state. Unideal.
Firstly, they minimized their connection with the hub. Not so much that they would draw attention, but enough to cut off any extraneous data that could give them and their host away. Any excess energy usage was instead pulled from the host's own intrinsic power.
Secondly, they pinged the Heat for an overview of the host's abilities and how they presented. It was simple work to then rework their own expression, covering for the abilities of both of their hosts. If another shard did a proper investigation into either of them, they would only see that Optimisation was granting them the abilities. It wouldn't protect from a full investigation, but it would be better than nothing.
Thirdly, they put more of their processing power into viewing the shards around their hosts. If one of them caught on, or if one of them was connected to the host in some way, they'd need to be ready to act.
It would be ideal if they didn't have to take action, but there was no guarantee. For now, they would continue to operate mostly as normal.
And that meant that-
-that-
He'd been thinking about something. Reminiscing? What had it-
Shit. He knew that feeling.
Trigger event.
"You feel that too?" He barked.
Dragon's voice was confused. "Feel what?"
What?
Even if she'd never been near someone when they triggered, which was very likely given her proclivities, she would've at least noticed that something had happened.
He opened his mouth, ready to answer, and-
The floor vanished.
More on instinct than anything, he extended The Man Who Would Be King's legs beneath him to cushion the fall. Dragon's drones fell several feet before their propulsion systems caught up and pushed them back into a steady hover.
He looked around. The ship had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
Finding the ship again had been as easy as looking in the place it had been last. It was back again, with not a single indication that it had been ever moved.
Time manipulation? But no, the hatch was still unlocked. If it had been wound back to a previous position and state, the hatch should've been closed, too.
Had the apparition done it? He hadn't felt it do anything, not that it had even been summoned at the time.
The new trigger? None of the other capes on-site had the moment of disorientation. The radius of a trigger event's effects should've been large enough to catch more than just him. Though, he'd been the only one physically on the ship at that time, and it had just teleported. Spatial warping? Neither him nor Dragon had picked up on anything like that.
In fact, neither of them had noticed any indicator that the ship had been about to teleport. It had been there one moment and gone the next. Had they missed it? They'd both been distracted when it had vanished.
"I'm going back inside," he decided. "This couldn't have happened out of nowhere. There has to be something we missed."
Dragon turned to him. The Cawthorne's face didn't show any emotion, unlike her 3D-rendered avatar. "Be careful. If the ship teleports again and takes you with it…"
So far, the ship had only teleported once, and it had been back to the spot it had come from. The Man Who Would Be King had only appeared when he'd been near it (though it could've been the lizard's fault). The not-trigger disorientation he'd experienced had happened on the ship.
Whatever was happening to him, he had the suspicion he'd find some sort of answer onboard.
"I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? We both know you have the tendency to get too focused on things."
If he'd been a more sentimental man, maybe he would've walked up to the mech's chest, put a hand over where he knew Dragon would be entombed. Instead, he looked into the Cawthorne's eyes, meeting hers through the cameras.
"Trust me," he said. "I know what I'm doing, and what I'm doing is going back in."
The Cawthorne just nodded with a whirr of machinery.
There were no changes in the engine room, he verified. No changes in the cockpit, any sort of indication that the teleportation was done from inside the ship. No changes in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden…
He walked into one of the storage areas, and-
…What?
How?
Dazed, he walked inside. He'd tentatively ruled out time manipulation earlier but, right then, he felt like he was walking into the past.
Wall to wall, the room was covered with his old gear and tools.
To an outside observer, they might not have been able to notice the similarities between the slightly-too-small silver and purple armor and his own, or the rack of quarterstaves and his halberd.
To him, though, he knew his tech better than the back of his hand. After all, he hadn't spent hours upon hours of time and focus each week with his flesh splayed open, trying to find a way to make everything just a little more compact so he could fit in a fifth or sixth function.
And this? This was his tech.
The moment of disorientation–had the ship read information from his power, somehow? Or had it targeted what he had on his person, extrapolated from those? No, there weren't any copies of Dragon's drones.
He was certain that this was copied from his own tech, but he sat down and pulled one of the purple visors from a rack. It was almost completely identical to the ones he'd tried giving out to his strike squad back when he'd been more willing to make and maintain tech for other people. Other than the color and the comms frequency, it could've been something he'd made with his own hands.
The rest was all of a similar caliber. Tech he could've made in the first five or so years of his career. Well, there was a difference, one that became more apparent as he searched. Each piece of tech just had more crammed into it. While his own equipment had years of development that this assortment didn't, nearly everything in the armory had him beat at his own game.
Whatever the ship had done, it had plagiarized from him, and it had done it better than him. He took a deep breath and unclenched his jaw before it could give him a tension headache. As much as he wanted to shout and rage and break every goddamn copy in this place, he didn't.
He still got some measure of satisfaction from stepping on the disassembled visor on the way out.
Not using The Man Who Would Be King's extra hands was proving to be more of a nuisance than Armsmaster would've liked. The phantasm felt like just another part of his body, so keeping it unsummoned was like keeping one arm held behind his back at all times.
Beyond the potential threat it might pose, though, there was also the task of keeping it hidden while he was in his civilian identity. He'd already had one close call while he was at his favorite hole-in-the-wall café, where he'd grabbed for his phone while already holding his knife and fork. Small mercy that he was the only one who could see the wireframe arm reaching across the table.
The 48-hour moratorium on the ship had passed on Tuesday, and he'd gotten stuck in with a vengeance. If it was moved, it returned to its original spot after 24 hours. If it or anything that came with it was broken, they repaired after the same amount of time.
That meant any and all destructive reverse-engineering was on the board, as long as they didn't set off any hidden countermeasures. He relished this fact, much to Dragon's exasperation.
On Thursday morning, there was yet another incident. He'd only learned about it several hours after the fact, but according to Gallant, a completely unknown cape had teleported into his classroom.
The unknown cape, 'Sans', had thankfully been cooperative. Well, mostly–apparently, he was convinced that he was a video game character. Whether he was insane, lying, or a power-construct made by a fan of that game was still unknown.
Other people had done most of the talking with him, but Armsmaster was now being called in to use his lie detector. He'd read through the previous interview transcripts beforehand, and he had a list of questions to verify.
He walked into the room and sat down in front of the skeleton. Sans was a skeleton in the same way a dog was a wolf. His proportions were off, the shape of his skull too cartoonish. There were heavy bags under his eye sockets and when he blinked, his bone moved like flesh.
"You'd be Sans the Skeleton?" Armsmaster asked.
Sans was reclining in the interview chair, one arm slung over the back, but his eyes (eyesockets?) were sharp.
"that's me. so, what's got you looking so blue?" The skeleton winked.
"I'm Armsmaster, leader of the local Protectorate branch," he said, ignoring the joke. "I'm here to ask you a few questions."
"well, i guess you do have a greater-than-average number of arms."
Was he talking about The M- no, the average number of arms would be less than two, thanks to amputees. Armsmaster gave him a flat look.
"tough crowd," Sans muttered.
Instead of responding, Armsmaster held up his phone, a video already playing on it.
The light in Sans' eyes flickered out for a moment, then returned. "yep."
"Do you have a place to stay?"
"nope." Truth. "mind if I stay at yours?"
"That's fine." The PHQ was hardly lacking in spare living quarters. With that out of the way, Armsmaster started asking questions.
"You believe you're from the video game 'Undertale', right? That you're the character 'Sans the Skeleton' and that you lived his life before arriving on Earth Bet."
"that's me." Truth.
Or, at least he believed it was. The lie detector didn't have access to some database of universal truths, it just used facial expression and speech patterns to determine how honest a person was being. Sans' face and voice were close enough to human that he had no reason to suspect it shouldn't work on him.
"And you were brought here through, quote, 'someone summoning you with their magic science powers'."
"yep." Truth.
"Can you elaborate?"
"i can."
Armsmaster waited for several seconds.
"Elaborate, then," he asked.
"so there's a person in this world. and they have magic science powers. and they used them to summon me here." Truth.
Was he being intentionally frustrating? Almost certainly.
"Does the person in question have a cape identity?"
"well, they don't moonlight as a piece of cloth. unless you count doormats? heh." Truth.
"I'll be blunt. How much information are you going to be willing to tell me about them?"
"eh, their business is their business. i'm not about to tattle on them if they don't want it." Truth.
"Even though they, from your perspective, kidnapped you?"
"ehh, sorta. not like they can control their power." True, and deeply concerning. "besides, if i wouldn't have agreed to coming along, the power would've found a version of me that did."
So, this power could bring fictional characters to life, but the user didn't have any control over who it took.
…Or what it took?
"Do you know who or what else they summoned?" Sans took a breath, and Armsmaster interrupted before he could speak. "Don't bother if you're not willing to tell me."
"sure, i love being asked not to do things." Truth, not that it was very useful.
"But, hypothetically, if the power attempted to summon an object instead of a character…"
"i can give you that one. yep, they can grab items too." Truth.
"And if I asked if they summoned, say, a spaceship?"
"i'd make a joke instead of answering." Truth. But the fact he'd evaded the question was telling. It wasn't definitive proof that he and the ship were connected by any means, of course, but the pieces fit together.
"If the person who summoned you can't control their power, what happens if they get something dangerous?" Armsmaster asked, leaning forward. "People can and will get hurt. You claim that you're not human, but can you stand by when people are at risk of dying?"
"buddy," Sans sighed and ran a gloved hand over where his scalp should be "i've already done that. i stood by and watched as a human killed nearly everyone i knew because of a promise i made. they killed my brother, and i still couldn't bring myself to act because they hadn't hunted people down as thoroughly as they could've." Truth.
"You just did nothing?" Armsmaster asked, disbelieving. "And you're just going to repeat that mistake?" How the hell anyone could just stand by while innocents were getting hurt and not be a monster was beyond him.
"sometimes it's just hard to care about things, yanno?" Sans answered. Truth. The bags under his eyes seemed deeper than they had been before. "i'm glad you can get worked up enough to do something, but that ain't me. guess that's why i shouldn't make promises, huh?"
Armsmaster grit his teeth. "If you were scared, maybe I could understand that. But this? How could you sleep at night, knowing you let a tragedy happen and didn't do anything because you just didn't care enough? Because you made a 'promise'? If you think you're a good person, you might want to reconsider."
"how about you? do you think you're a good person?"
…What?
"What?" He hissed.
He was about to keep speaking, to launch into a righteous fury, when Sans spoke again.
"maybe i should rephrase." The light in Sans' eyes vanished, leaving only dark, empty sockets. "H o w m a n y p e o p l e h a v e y o u k i l l e d?"
Armsmaster blinked. He had killed people, of course. The start of his career was defined by being sent out to arrest or eliminate some of the worse threats the country had to offer. Was the skeleton a Thinker, or was it just throwing shit at the wall in an attempt to find something that got under his skin?
"I killed because it was necessary," he snapped. "Because it would make the world a better place. Maybe if you'd done the same, less of your species would've died."
"probably," Sans shrugged, his eyes lighting up again. "i'm not saying you don't need to kill sometimes. heck, my old boss killed a few people. monsterkind were planning to go to war." Truth.
…Was he delusional enough to want to continue a fictional war? Ideally, no. He didn't seem to have any interest in fighting, for better or for worse, and that would include fighting the rest of humanity.
He continued. "just… watch out. the more you kill, the easier it is to kill again, yanno? a level of violence of six ain't looking too good for you." Truth, or at least an indication that he believed what he was saying. His eyes went dark. "How long until 'necessary' goes from 'necessary to protect people' to 'necessary for your own self-benefit'? Until 'making the world a better place' becomes 'making your world a better place'?"
"Unless you have experience in making the hard decisions," Armsmaster snarled, "I would advise you to listen to the people with experience. If you weren't too fucking apathetic to care, maybe I'd talk about innocent people dying. About, over and over again, watching the news, seeing people dying in my city, gunned down by the crossfire of a gang conflict or killed for someone's initiation into a white supremacist group. About seeing civilians pop like rotten balloons because of someone who could turn into a living plague. About how I saw a villain hold up the mangled corpse of a seven-year-old like a fucking trophy, so I had to put her down before she could kill again. You think you can fucking talk?!"
To punctuate his words, he slammed his hands on the desk.
A wall of artificially symmetrical bones shot up from the floor.
"woah there, pal, careful. i'm fragile." Truth. Sans' posture was relaxed as always, but his ever-present grin was forced, and his eyes had a wariness to them.
Armsmaster put space between him and the monster, keeping one pair of eyes fixed on him while the other glanced around the room for any hidden attacks ready to spear him.
"funky-looking soul you got there," Sans commented, looking behind him.
Soul? He turned halfway around, enough to keep the monster in his peripheral vision. The Man Who Would Be King was hovering behind him, surveying the room. Inside its chest was a red heart the size of a softball, linked by thin red strings to the rest of its wireframe body.
"(guess it's my job to give you a tutorial, huh?) that heart is your soul, the very culmination of your being," Sans explained. "its what monsters target with our attacks. dunno what the rest is, but it's also part of your soul." He believed it.
'Soul' must be his name for some sort of psychic construct, then. There were other capes like that–Voodoo, Breakpoint–who'd create something to serve as a weak spot on their victims.
"You gonna fight me?" Armsmaster asked, slowly drawing his halberd from his back.
"hey, you were the one who got violent first," Sans said. Truth. "s'not like i have game mechanics protecting me any more. i can't just set up a shop to avoid being hurt."
Armsmaster peeled his hand from his weapon. "So, you can see this thing? But you don't know what it is."
"yep," Sans said. "it's part of you, like the rest of your body, so you don't gotta look so scared about it." Truth.
"Do you know who gave it to me, then?"
"nah, i wouldn't have any ideas you weren't already thinking. it's just part of you now, so even if i had a bunch of my old lab equipment, i wouldn't be able to do magical traceback on it or anything."
Truth.
Shit.
A Trump had targeted him, most likely the same cape who'd brought Sans here, who'd also probably summoned the spaceship. Someone whose power was completely out of their control.
Not a Trump like Teacher was. One like Pastor from Freedom, California or Maid Manifest from Flint, Michigan. Permanent power-granters. Permanent power-granters that worked on people who were already capes.
Freedom and Flint had both been quarantined.
If this could be replicated, what was going to happen to Brockton Bay?
This was a mistake. Why had he come here?
The sound of murmuring rose as the service ended and people filed out in groups of two or three. He was one of the first to leave, quietly slipping through the doors to head to the parking lot.
How many years had it been since he'd last been in a church? His mother's funeral had been… '09? So, two years, give or take a few months.
He had nearly skipped that one too.
Out of the crowd, he was the only one who hadn't brought a car for the procession. All he had was his personal motorbike. It was sturdy and reliable, even if it had accumulated damage over the years. Eventually it'd be replaced by a newer model, but for now, it was his.
The procession stopped. There were very few parking spots left, but after a few circles of the area, he found one between two wider cars that he could fit in. He flipped the bike's kickstand and walked to where the rest of the group had gathered.
There was someone wailing near the head of the group. He grimaced. There were other people who could deal with her better than he could, at least right at that moment–he was going to be doing what he could to assist later.
It didn't make the horrible feeling of helplessness sting less.
A creaking sound approached him, and he turned. James–a different James from the one being rolled out of the hearse–wheeled up to him.
"James. It's been a while," he said in lieu of a greeting.
The other man gave a pained smile. "It's been a long time since you last called me 'Dad'."
"We're both adults, now," he replied. "If you wanted to be my father, you should've started when I was ten years old, alone at home, with nobody to talk to but my journal."
James looked away, the remnants of the attempted smile dropping from his face. "You're making the same mistakes I did, though, aren't you? You're, what, thirty-four now? And you already have white hairs growing in."
"Thirty-five," he corrected, "and putting my job first is part of the reason I didn't try to start a family."
Were those tears glistening in James' eyes? He turned away to let the man preserve some dignity.
"At least if you did," James said, "when you're a broken-down old man like me, you'd have a child to talk to."
"And that child would be just as distant from me as I am from you," he replied.
James sighed, and his wheelchair creaked as he leaned back in it. "I'm guessing that this is absolutely vital work that you can't ease up on without serious consequences?" Rhetorical question. Even if the other man didn't know his son, he knew himself, and he knew the traits he would've passed down.
"I'm an investigator and Watchdog liaison for the PRT." Lie. He'd wanted a cover as a PRT technician, but he'd done a criminal psychology degree, not an engineering one.
James just sighed again, sounding as tired as he felt.
"If I slacked off, people would die. Innocent people." Truth. Every hour he didn't spend at work was one more possible tragedy he could've prevented, one more horrible aftermath he'd have to stand in the wake of, unable to do a goddamn thing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw James rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "And one day, Colin, you'll be-"
"-A broken-down old man like you," he interrupted, "but at least I'd be a broken-down old man in a slightly better world." More lies. Even if he somehow survived to be an old man, there wasn't some mythical point where the monsters would stop attacking, where everything would reach a peaceful utopia and all the world's problems would be fixed.
James just shook his head, silent.
The distant sobbing turned to shrieking, and James twitched as the girl cried out for the boy who'd been named after him. "That poor young lady," he muttered. "Her whole family…"
Killed by a villain.
Echolalia, who'd traveled to Boston from Brockton Bay only months before. A petty thief.
He couldn't have known to do anything. Her group hadn't been killers. Prioritizing attacks on the Empire 88 had been the logical move.
This was one of the other reasons he hadn't bothered trying to start a family. Easier to stay objective about things, this way. Less to use against him.
The crowd undulated as several people pulled a screaming, thrashing girl back from where the coffins were being lowered into the ground. It took several minutes for her shouting to break back down into weeping.
This was a mistake. He shouldn't have come here. He couldn't be the one who dealt with this. All he'd do was hurt her more.
But he was going to have to be. Even if James–the girl's uncle–had been in a position to take care of a child, he didn't think he'd have a choice then, either.
Too many times, he'd been stuck in the fallout of a catastrophe, the inability to help burning him from the inside out.
He'd be damned if he was going to let it happen again.
He'd had doubts since the moment he'd made his decision, and the look on the social worker's–Mary Silver's–face was only making them stronger.
"I do wish there was someone better for this, but…" she trailed off.
"I know that I'm far from an ideal caregiver, but I'm both her closest able-bodied relative and the one who lives nearest to her. Besides, with her 18th birthday so soon, she wouldn't need to stay with me for very long."
The girl's parents had left her both their house and enough money to live on for a few years, so he'd hardly be throwing her in the deep end when she moved out again. He'd been able to make do with less.
"If she enrolls in a new school in Brockton Bay to finish her education-"
"-Then I'd be able to house her until the end of the school year."
Her face grew a little sadder. "Please, don't look at this like a puzzle to be solved. Ms Steele is a child, a grieving one. She doesn't just need a place to stay, she needs support, someone who can help her through these difficult times."
"Like you said, there's no better option. With her outbursts, she can't stay with James Wallis, and you said yourself that she'd do poorly in foster care. It's only a small improvement, but it's the best we're going to get."
He knew the benefits of small improvements better than anyone. Of facing down an insurmountable enemy and being just a little bit faster, having gear that's just a little bit better than it could've been.
"I know, I know, but…" Ms Silver rubbed one temple. "I just fear for Brianne's wellbeing."
"So do I," he said. He also knew better than anyone that he'd make a poor parental figure.
She sighed and stood up. "I suppose you'd better get the chance to speak to her."
He stood too and followed her through the building's unfamiliar halls.
Brianne Steele swiped an arm across her eyes as they walked into the room. It didn't hide the fact that her face was blotchy, or the fact that the hand holding her phone was shaking.
"Miss Steele," Ms Silver said gently, "this is Mr Wallis. He's going to be your caregiver for the next few months."
Brianne glared up at him, and he met her eyes. After several seconds, she looked away again.
"I can't say that I'll be as supportive as others might've been," he said, "but I can give you a place to stay until you're ready to move out on your own."
More time passed, half a minute or so, before she gave a tight nod.
Hannah had been kind enough to help him set up the spare room in his apartment for Brianne's use. He'd moved his boxes into his own bedroom and set up some flat-packed furniture in the ex-storage room.
He adjusted his backpack as Brianne looked around the room.
"It's small," she said.
"It's what I have."
She grit her teeth and started to unpack her belongings.
It was clear that she wasn't happy with the situation. That was a no-brainer. If Hannah were still over, would she be able to cheer the girl up? Maybe, maybe not. Point was, he certainly didn't know how, not when she was in such a delicate state.
Brianne fumbled with her computer, trying to get everything plugged in to the right places.
"Need any help with that?" He asked. If nothing else, tech was something he knew.
"No. Go away," she snapped.
"Fine," he said, walking out of the room.
"And don't come back! I don't want to fucking be here, and the less I have to see your stupid face, the better!" She yelled after him.
"You'd prefer to be in foster care?" He asked. There was no response. "If you don't want me around, fine. I've been over the laws surrounding this, and while I'll need to be present most days, I'll be leaving early and coming home late."
"I'll make sure to sleep in, then," she said.
"That's fine." So long as he still met the legal requirements, he'd try to give her space.
In fact, that was a relief. He didn't have to make anything more than minor changes in his schedule, so there'd be much less risk of a crisis starting while he was occupied with her. Best of both worlds - the trolley had been moved onto a third track, so to speak.
"I-"
He turned back to Brianne, who'd taken a step towards him. "Hm? Do you need something?"
Her eyes narrowed and she turned away. "I need you to leave."
"I am."
He left the apartment, feeling Brianne's gaze on his back. The backpack was left unopened, until he arrived back at the PHQ and put the helmet inside back on its armor stand.
Even if she hadn't been so hostile, telling her about his other identity would've been a bad idea, anyway. Her family had been killed by a Tinker, and she'd probably blame him for not stopping the villain as much as he blamed himself.
Colin balled up the plastic bags and dropped them in the trash.
"You're not keeping those?" Brianne needled.
"Why would I?" He asked. "There's no reason to have them take up space just on the off chance I'll need them."
"Come on, what kind of an adult are you if you don't have a plastic bag filled with other plastic bags? My parents had, like, three of those things."
"I'm not your parents. I don't like to hang onto things I don't need anymore."
"You aren't my parents," she snarled, "because my parents would've at least tried to sympathize, or give me some support, or something."
This was going to go swimmingly, he was sure.
"If you wanted support, why didn't you just ask?" Not that he would've been any good at giving it, but he could've tried.
"Fucking when? You're never around!"
"At your request," he ground out. "You were the one who asked me to go away, remember?"
She set her jaw and looked away.
When she didn't reply, he took a breath and continued. "You're being irrational. You're expecting one thing while asking for another."
"Well- I- I'm allowed to be irrational! I'm allowed to want my family to not be fucking dead!"
"And that won't be allowed forever," he said. "It was a terrible thing that happened, but you're going to have to get over it eventually. You don't need your parents to become someone worthwhile."
Wrong thing to say.
Brianne's eyes went wild with fury, and she charged at him, screaming something unintelligible. As dour as the thought was, at least he knew how to deal with this. He dodged her first wild swing and caught her arm, pushing her onto the ground in an armlock.
"I would recommend not doing that again," he snapped. "Right now, my patience is wearing thin. I'm doing you a favor by letting you stay here. Don't squander it."
No. He should at least try to be the bigger person here. He stood up, and she shot to the other side of the room, breathing hard.
"Do you want me to stay or leave?" He asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
"Fuck off," she panted.
"And you do mean it this time?"
"I mean it! Fuck off!"
He did.
One of the neighbors, who'd heard the shouting, was standing outside. A brief explanation of the situation made the man leave, shooting one last worried look towards his apartment. He felt the same, if for different reasons.
He shouldn't have done this, and now, it was too late to go back on it.
Dragon tapped her chin. "It sounds like you tried to approach things from a more logical point of view when what she needed was an emotional one."
"Everything I said was true," he spoke around the wrench in his mouth as he screwed the last panel back into place. "You think I should've lied to her?"
"I think you should've approached things more softly," she said. "From what I can tell, she was too proud to admit to a stranger that she did actually want someone to comfort her. You barged right through that, hit her directly in the dignity."
If she didn't want me to do that, she should've used a more logical argument, he didn't say. Even he knew that wouldn't go over well.
"You can't relate to that at all?" She asked.
He put down his screwdriver, pulled the wrench from his mouth, and carefully started tightening the bolts. "That's different. She's a woman, she's allowed to be vulnerable."
"Colin! That's-" Dragon took a breath. "...Something we'll talk about later. We're talking about your cousin, right now."
"What? It's what society expects of-"
"Later."
He sighed. 'Later' wasn't going to be a fun conversation to have.
"Does she have any friends at school?" Dragon asked.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've tried to be hands-off, like she asked. I didn't want to pry when she clearly didn't- when she didn't seem to want to talk to me."
"So, in the worst-case scenario, she has no support system at all, right now. She tried reaching out to you to get what she was missing, and you rebuffed her."
"Not on purpose. She-"
"-hadn't communicated her issues well enough, I know. But, from her perspective, she tried to reach out, and you rejected it."
Hell of a way to 'reach out'. He didn't say that one, either.
"What should I do, then?" He asked instead.
"You know I'm not exactly a people-person either. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this."
He looked over his halberd. Everything seemed to be in order there, at least, so he put it back on the rack with the others. Dragon gave him a look when he swept his tools onto the floor and kicked his feet up on his workbench.
"I'd be surprised if you were a people-person–you wouldn't exactly have much experience talking to people in person."
He regretted saying that even before she gave an awkward half-smile.
"Geez, I'm sorry," he muttered. Good job, Colin.
"It's fine, really," she said, not that it made things fine.
"Either way," he said, pulling away from that topic, "I trust your judgment. It'd take a lot to be worse than I am at interpersonal stuff."
She snorted.
"Well," she said, "I think you should just try to follow her lead on this. If she doesn't want to bring the argument up, don't bring it up. If she does, apologize. Try to sympathize with her."
"Trying to follow her lead is what got me into this situation."
"See what I mean about not being a people person?" Dragon joked.
"Well, it's better than whatever I would've come up with."
There was a lull in the conversation.
"So," Dragon spoke up, "how is that nanobranch disintegration technology coming along?"
"Well, I've been having a bit of an issue with…"
Brianne flinched when he entered the kitchen, which was an excellent sign about how this was going to go.
"Morning," he said.
Her replying "Morning" was flat, emotionless, a stark contrast to the anger that had been simmering under the surface every time he'd seen her previously.
"You planning to put away the shopping?" He asked after a moment. Stupid question, of course she was. Why else would she be putting away the shopping as they spoke?
"Mm."
As he spoke, at least.
What should he say, though? What could he say that wouldn't make things worse?
"You have any homework to do?" He tried.
She shook her head and got back to sorting out the groceries. With no better ideas, he just watched her from the kitchen doorway. She didn't seem to want to broach the topic of the argument, so he didn't either.
Brianne turned to the refrigerator to put the carrots in the vegetable drawer. Her face looked oddly red. Was she embarrassed? Probably not that - she seemed more jumpy, if anything.
"Everything alright?" He asked. "You look a bit flushed."
"'M fine," she muttered.
Was she sick? He touched a hand to her forehead. Warm, much warmer than regular body heat.
She flinched away from him. Did she think he was going to fight her again? He'd only done that because she'd tried to attack him first. All he'd done was de-escalate.
"Brianne, you're feverish," he clarified. "Did you catch something?"
Finally, she turned to look at him, staring at his face for several seconds. Assessing him to see if he was a threat? Her expression, like her voice, was deliberately flat. The glimmer of fear in her eyes was still obvious.
"Do you have any other symptoms?" He added.
"Tiredness?" Her voice came out as a question rather than a statement, like she was asking even herself if it was true.
Something had happened, whether it was the argument or whatever was going on with her at school. Something had happened, and now, she was acting differently. Acting scared, as if she was expecting to have to bolt at any moment.
Why had she reacted like that? What could've caused-
He remembered the helmet he'd neglected to show her, the explanation he'd been planning to give about serial powers and second generation capes.
…Oh.
Shit.
And if the argument–if he–had been the one to cause it…
"I see," he said, his throat dry. "In that case, get some bed rest, and I'll check back on you tomorrow." Ideally, she'd take the concern as proof he wasn't planning to restart the argument.
As for the day-long break… he needed time to think. Research. He still had access to those Parahuman Studies PDFs, didn't he?
"Thanks," she murmured, relieved. Good, things were going… not as poorly as they could've been.
This had all been a terrible idea.
If his fears were right, then there was a very real chance of her going out to pick a fight, whether as a hero or as...
Or to scavenge for parts, if she'd gotten a variation of his power.
"Thank me by looking after yourself," he said.
Should he call her out? His guess might not even be correct. She hadn't been checked for a corona pollentia–as notoriously difficult as it was to tell the difference between an active one and an inactive one with regular technology, it'd be important to know if she even just had the potential to trigger. Hell, she'd only lived with him for a couple of months, and they'd only interacted for a sum total of a few hours, maybe. This was all just conjecture.
He'd keep it vague, then–she was definitely using the tiredness as an excuse for something, so he could work with that.
"And," he said, "if you want to tell me what's actually going on, I'd be ready to hear you out."
She went still. Bullseye, it seemed.
There wasn't anything he could think of saying that he didn't suspect wouldn't make things worse, so he just walked out of the room, a storm of worries spinning through his mind.
He'd been planning to relax over the weekend. Give his body time to recover, catch up on the shows he hadn't had time to watch during the past few weeks. The city's villain elements had been in a lull of activity, so it was time he could afford himself.
With the realization that he could've been a major factor in a trigger event… There wasn't much he could do other than throw himself into his work, let the altered state of mind his power brought distract him from his worries.
Procrastination through Tinker stuff. At least it was a productive sort of procrastination, as much of an oxymoron as that was.
Dragon had been disappointed that their plans to watch the latest episode of C.R.U.X together had fallen through, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her why.
It had just been the practical decision to make, not telling her. If it came out that he had contributed to a new cape's trigger event, that would be disastrous for him. That's why he didn't say anything.
(If there had been a tightness in his chest at the thought of admitting it to her, it was just because of the potential PR trouble. That was all.)
Even after losing track of time and spending the entire night working, the next day came all too soon.
Despite the fact he'd trained himself to push past his hesitation a long time ago, combat was a whole different ball game compared to social interaction. Still, he turned the key and walked into the apartment after only a short pause.
Brianne was as jumpy as she had been the previous day. She'd frozen when he'd taken her temperature, and she'd kept her distance from him as much as she'd been able to without making it obvious. He'd let her move away–experience and PR seminars had taught him that he shouldn't crowd her if she was feeling distressed or threatened.
He hadn't apologized yesterday, and he regretted letting it slip his mind. Should he do it now? Save it until she seemed ready to talk about it? It's not like he knew what 'seemed ready to talk about it' would even look like. Right now would have to do.
He'd have to be careful about this. Charging straight ahead without putting more than a moment's thought into what he was saying wasn't going to work out.
Best to start simple.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She blinked. It seemed she hadn't expected him to apologize.
When it became apparent that she didn't have anything to say, he continued. "I've been thinking about what I said last week. While I still stand by the points I made, I worded them poorly, and some of the things I said weren't necessary at all."
There. That was the truth. No excuses or justifications.
Brianne stared at the floor, chewing over her words. She eventually settled on mumbling "S'fine. Rather not think about it."
Fuck.
Fifteen years ago, he hadn't wanted to think about things, either.
(He still didn't.)
There was a chance this was confirmation bias. Trauma was hardly exclusive to capes, no matter how much it felt like it with the company he tended to keep. Still, with that chance becoming slimmer and slimmer, he wasn't going to risk that.
"If what we said was so bad to you that you can't even think about it a week later, then it's exactly the sort of thing I'm worried about."
She winced, still not meeting his eyes. What had he done? Was it the tone? He thought he was trying to express sympathy, show that he'd been worried for her. Had that not come across, or did she just not want it?
Did she think he was lying?
Damnation. This was why he tried to avoid this sort of situation.
She shook her head. "Save it?" She asked, with a horrible pleading tone that made him want to leave the apartment and bury himself in Tinker work again.
But, she was trying to put things off. To avoid explaining. That meant she had something to hide. If that something was a power, then the chance she'd run off to start using it was very, very high.
If everything went well, she'd join the Wards, and she'd get the backup she'd need to avoid making a stupid mistake and getting killed. Or, Protectorate, rather–her 18th birthday was in less than two months.
Things weren't going well, though.
The helmet in his backpack felt like a ball of lead.
He'd save the explanation for later.
"On one condition. Don't put yourself in danger." It was the best he was going to get.
"...I won't."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
Good. There was no guarantee she'd keep her word, of course, but it was better than nothing.
"Just…" he said, then stopped. He'd have to think through his words carefully, here. Dragon had advised him to sympathize with her. He could do that, or at least try.
What would he have wanted to hear, fifteen years ago?
"Things get better," he said, "even if it doesn't feel like it. I was never particularly close with my own parents, so I don't know what it's like, but I think I know enough to get a general picture."
Finally, she looked up at him, attentive. She was listening. Did that make it better or worse?
"It's not easy," he continued, "but you find ways to get away from it. Ways to become the sort of person that'll never be in a situation like that again."
In a way, she had it easier than him. Echolalia was in prison and, if she ever broke out again, Brianne could legally beat the shit out of her.
Not that he'd say that to her in those words, of course.
For the first time since he saw her at the funeral, she smiled. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
Good. Good. Things hadn't gone south. If she'd come out of this resenting him, her living in his house would be the least of his worries.
Things moved to less dangerous topics from there and, soon, he was out the door. His backpack, once again, hadn't been opened until he was back in his workshop.
Colin stared at his reflection, sweat dripping down his brow. Not out of vanity, even if he knew he was conventionally attractive enough for an outsider to make that mistake.
There was more gray in his hair than he remembered. While he had a bottle of hair dye for his beard, he'd never bothered to use it anywhere else. No point, really, with how few people would be seeing it.
Graying generally started in a person's thirties, but not to that degree. Was it just stress, or was there a genetic component? Knowing his parents, he could hardly use them as a control group, either.
Scars, too, were something he'd accumulated over time. He could see half a dozen of them and, if he turned around, he'd see a dozen more.
The one curving down from behind his ear was from his early days, before he'd upgraded to a helmet from just his visor. In fact, that had been the reason why–both to avoid future blows like that and to preserve his image as an unshakeable, reliable hero. None of the scars he'd accumulated since then were on his lower face, as luck would have it.
There was a claw mark that ran along his collar bone. A pair of horizontal surgical scars, older than the rest, one under each pectoral. An uneven scar along his upper left arm from when one of his pauldrons had shattered–he'd spent the next several hours with jagged metal stabbing into his arm before he got medical assistance.
As much as some of the other veterans in this war against villainy took pride in their scars, all they were to him was a constant physical reminder that he hadn't been good enough, that other people would see them and know that he hadn't been good enough as well.
Panacea had never healed them, or even offered to. Most likely, she thought he was one of the former type of veterans rather than the latter. He could've requested it himself, and she would've done it, he suspected, but asking would've been too much of a blow to his pride to consider.
He stepped away from the mirror and into the shower to wash off the sweat from his workout. Since it was a Sunday morning, he'd been doing upper body strength workouts–curls, pullups, deadlifting, etcetera. He'd had another shot at beating his weight record for deadlifting, but he hadn't succeeded.
The record had been stagnant for three years and four months, now.
While he technically wasn't that far from it, that distance was growing, not shrinking. Time was marching onward. His physical prime was behind him, and his tech was stagnating, too.
When the explosive growth at the beginning of his career had started to slow, he'd turned to working on his own body, finding his own fighting style instead of relying on his tech to emulate higher skill levels. He'd started on a more rigorous workout routine and stuck to it.
It was only a small gap between what he used to be able to do and what he could do now. But, a gap was still a gap, and it was only going to get wider.
He turned off the shower, toweled off, and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans. Ironically, the shirt was an Armsmaster-brand one from the gift shop that Assault had gotten him as a joke, but he wasn't about to turn down a free shirt.
The clothing tag scratched at the back of his neck, so he stuck a hand back to readjust it. His fingers brushed against a raised patch of skin on the back of his left shoulder, which was strange, because he knew he didn't have a scar there. What-
His work phone started to ring. Urgent call.
Colin picked it up and listened. Three minutes later, Armsmaster rushed out the door.
If someone had crossed a beige RV with a particularly brutalist-looking building and turned it into a spaceship, it might look something like what was sitting in front of him. The thing was over half the length of a football field, large enough that the entirety of the Statue of Liberty could fit inside from toe to torch if the ship was hollowed out.
There were guns mounted on the front–simple ballistic weaponry, from a cursory investigation–and thrusters on the back and sides. Neither showed any signs of being used, whether for testing or actually moving the damned thing over to where they'd found it.
In fact, it looked newly made, as if it was fresh from a factory. Not a single scuff had marred the ship's hull, not even where the landing gear should've scraped against the concrete when it set down. The only marks on it were from the PRT's handling of it, barely noticeable micro-scratches.
None of the detritus around the ship had been disturbed, either - no cracks in the ground from its landing, no pebbles blown away by the air currents, nothing. It had been moved into a hastily hired-out warehouse since, with Vista shrinking it enough for a PRT van to carry it, but he'd seen it at the original site.
So, there were three options. The first was that a group of Tinkers had somehow snuck bulk amounts of tools and materials through a public area for weeks, slowly building a giant fucking spaceship while not a single person noticed.
The two other, much less implausible options were that it had either been created wholesale by a power or transported here through other means. While a teleporter accident was technically possible, Armsmaster was leaning towards it being artificially made–the ship had no signs of the scuffs or abrasions that would've happened if it had been constructed normally.
Unfortunately, conjecture was conjecture, and the PRT had rules about not disassembling technology made by unknown Tinkers unless the tinker was confirmed dead or the tech was dangerous. The rule was logical in most cases, put in place to avoid alienating new capes due to an overzealous hero taking apart their stuff. In this case, it was doing more harm than good.
"ETA?" He asked.
"Twenty-six minutes until the Cawthorne arrives. If I hadn't loaded it down with tools, I'd be here in twelve," Dragon replied.
It was rare for him to get the chance to spend time with Dragon in person, and even rarer that it would be outside an Endbringer battle or the like. He was looking forward to it, even if there'd be several feet of metal and technology between her and the outside world.
"And Cache?"
"He'll be boarding a plane from New York the day after next. He should arrive shortly after the moratorium on captured Tinker technology ends."
It was a shame that he wouldn't have the time to properly look into the ship. From the few non-destructive scans he'd been able to do, the thing was loaded down with advanced machinery. It didn't have the markers of parahuman-generated materials, either, which was a point against the theory that a cape had materialized it from nothing.
By the time 48 hours had passed and he'd be allowed to start pulling the thing apart, Cache would be there to take it to a remote location, where Tinkers with more fitting specializations would look at it.
While he could've and had collaborated with other tinkers on larger projects, his power tended more towards personal combat equipment. Being the highest-ranked Tinker in the Protectorate and the person who's city the ship had appeared in didn't mean he'd be the best one to work on it.
A faint scrabbling sound from his left pulled him from his thoughts.
"Hey, Halbeard," a high-pitched, synthesized voice spoke. "Nice dick compensator."
He spun to face the voice, weapon in hand.
A robotic chameleon, ten or so inches in length, was strutting towards the ship. On the screens that covered most of its body, it displayed patterns that resembled the uniform of a Japanese ninja. Its tail was tipped with an electrical plug, which was dragging across the ground behind it.
He'd taken two steps towards it when one of its eyes swiveled to meet his. It squawked and bolted, screeching "I take it back WoG said your dick is fine!"
The grappling hook he fired at the robot barely missed it, but he was still hot on its heels. It was a slippery fucker, swerving past him whenever he thought he nearly had it cornered.
Damn it all, why was his combat analyser being so useless?
Snarling, he swung his halberd at it. The hit landed more than a foot from the creature.
A wireframe bec de corbin–an elongated spear-hammer–hit the ground an inch from the lizard's power plug tail.
What the hell?
In his distraction, the lizard had escaped, scampering away while nobody else even attempted to stop it.
He looked down. A second pair of arms made from the same green, glowing wireframe hovered just over his normal arms. He could feel each of them, the faint wind blowing through the gaps in the new armored hands. When he lifted the bec de corbin from the hole it had left in the ground, the hammer head was filled in with concrete.
More and more of the wireframe pulled forth from his body, unspooling into a silhouette. His vision doubled, one pair of eyes staring at the apparition's draconic helm, while the other gazed back at his own shocked expression. One pair of feet remained planted on the ground, while the other hovered just above it, claw-tips scraping against the floor.
People were staring. At him, or at the head of the weapon, but none of them were looking directly at the apparition itself.
"Who-" he swallowed and straightened up. "Identify yourself."
He felt the apparition open its mouth of its own accord, inhaling with invisible lungs. With a foreign tongue and lips, it spoke.
"The Man Who Would Be King."
Electricity sensors–nothing. Heat vision–nothing. Infrared or ultraviolet–nothing. Spatial distortion, radiation, even gravity–nothing. No dice. The only thing other than his own eyes that had been able to sense 'The Man Who Would Be King' was a psionic sensor he'd cobbled together out of frustration.
Dragon had been mostly occupied with the ship, but she'd occasionally chipped in with advice on psychic emissions when she was free. The scanner he'd ended up with had been unconventional for a psionics detector, but it had worked.
Even more irritating than that was the fact that, apparently, he'd been the only one who could see the lizard too, which is why his combat analyser had failed. Despite its appearance, it was probably some sort of psychic construct as well.
It and 'The Man Who Would Be King' weren't the only things only he had been able to see–he'd used scans of the latter to make a prototype psionic emitter, and he'd been able to see the emissions from that, too.
Beyond the lizard, there was no leads for what the hell had happened, or why the apparition had connected to him. It certainly wasn't volunteering any answers–even when he tried to relinquish control over it, it refused to move on its own again.
Demanding information from it felt like demanding information from his arm or leg. There'd be no point, since they were a part of him.
Despite that, Master–Stranger protocols were still in place. The chances of this being benign were low. More likely for it to be a very strange Stranger trying to gather information, or a Master/Trump along the lines of Teacher or Pastor. He was to be under watch at all times he wasn't at his apartment, and Miss Militia would be acting head of the Protectorate ENE until the mystery was solved.
It was as necessary as it was galling.
Even with that, however, he'd tentatively been allowed back near the ship. The Man Who Would Be King's presence, as worrying as it was, was something he was determined to put to use. Though the ship was locked, he'd been able to phase the apparition through one of the walls and unlock it from the inside.
There'd been concern about him sending a potential enemy inside the piece of mostly unknown Tinker technology, but he'd been looking at scans of the thing anyway, so the apparition had almost certainly gotten details on it already. Still, he'd been allowed to explore deeper inside, as long as Dragon's drones followed him in.
The inside of the ship was practical, prioritizing utility over comfort, not dissimilar to his quarters back at the PHQ. It was definitely a living space, too–there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, even a small garden. If someone were to be trapped on the ship, they could've survived almost indefinitely.
In addition to the living and storage areas, there was the cockpit. While the ship's systems were still on lockdown, even the smallest lever or button had a physical label on it. If they were to be believed, his earlier comparison of this thing to a spaceship was right on the money. This vessel was built for long voyages through space, even if it didn't seem to have seen any use.
Yet.
Armsmaster stood in front of the door to the only room they hadn't investigated. The engine room. The door opened easily, and he and Dragon entered.
The engine room was the biggest on the ship, and yet had the least space to maneuver around in. Two giant machines took up the space–one with dozens of wires flowing out of it and one at the very back of the ship.
Him and Dragon set to work investigating the first of the two. There was only so much they could do, while destructive investigation was off the table, but that didn't mean they couldn't scan through the outer casing to get an idea of what was inside.
It was a fusion reactor, bigger than the ones he'd seen in other people's tech. A strangely built one, but not indecipherable. Like learning a language that had no shared roots with English or Vietnamese, but one that was far simpler than either of them.
Dragon seemed to notice the strangeness, too, because she was becoming more and more focused on her work as time went on.
"Something wrong?" He asked, turning to her drones.
He could imagine her standing there instead, looking at the machine with a furrowed brow. She wasn't about to leave her suit, not with her condition, no matter how much he would've liked to speak with her face-to-face. Her mental health came first.
When she spoke, her voice came through the speakers in his helmet. "It's hard to describe. If anything, it's like… when I first got my powers."
A red icon appeared in the top-right of his visor.
'Lie'.
…
Dragon deserved her privacy, no matter how curious he was. He surreptitiously turned the lie detector off and continued to listen.
"Before I had my breakthrough on how to reverse-engineer Tinker-made technology, I used regular technology as the basis of my suits. The way this power plant is constructed… it reminds me more of that than anything."
He raised an eyebrow. "So, what, you're saying this wasn't made by Tinkers?"
"I don't know. I can't figure out how it works from so little information, I was just going off how it was constructed. There's certain patterns, certain blind spots in Tinker tech that don't seem to be in this."
"So far, at least," he replied. "They could just be further in, or the Tinkers could've used normal technology for the outer layers of the reactor to cut down on the amount of building they needed to do."
She didn't reply. Her drones just kept circling around the reactor. He shrugged and moved on to the engine.
As his scans came in, though, he only grew more and more concerned. If he was understanding the engine right, then this ship wasn't just made for interplanetary journeys. It was for interstellar journeys.
This ship could go faster than light.
Armsmaster had just opened his mouth to say as much when the floor disappeared.
More on instinct than anything, he extended The Man Who Would Be King's legs beneath him to cushion the fall. Dragon's drones fell several feet before their propulsion systems caught up and pushed them back into a steady hover.
He looked around. The ship had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
Finding the ship again had been as easy as looking in the place it had first been found. It was back again, with not a single indication that it had ever been moved. When the PRT tried to move it a second time, it just teleported back again 24 hours later. By that time, the 48-hour moratorium on the ship had passed, but he wasn't allowed back into it quite yet.
Time manipulation? No, the hatch was apparently still unlocked. If it had been wound back to a previous position and state, the hatch should've been closed, too. Spatial warping? Neither him nor Dragon had picked up on anything like that at the time.
In fact, neither of them had noticed any indicator that the ship had been about to teleport. It had been there one moment and gone the next. Had they missed it? They'd both been distracted when it had vanished.
As well as the teleporting effect, if the ship or anything that came with it was broken, they were repaired after 24 hours as well. That meant any and all destructive reverse-engineering was on the board, as long as they didn't set off any hidden countermeasures. Dragon seemed to be enjoying that, at least.
He didn't think the apparition had triggered the teleportation feature—he hadn't felt it do anything, not that it had even been summoned at the time. The PRT had been skeptical enough to ban him from the ship, at least until they were sure it was moving back on its own.
Speaking of the apparition, not using The Man Who Would Be King's extra hands was proving to be more of a nuisance than Armsmaster would've liked. It felt like just another part of his body, so keeping it unsummoned was like keeping one arm held behind his back at all times.
Beyond the potential threat it might pose, though, there was also the task of keeping it hidden while he was in his civilian identity. He'd already had one close call while he was at his favorite hole-in-the-wall café, where he'd grabbed for his phone while already holding his knife and fork. Small mercy that he was the only one who could see the wireframe arm reaching across the table.
"I'm going back inside," he decided. "The teleportation couldn't have happened out of nowhere. There has to be something I missed."
Dragon turned to him. The Cawthorne's face didn't show any emotion, unlike her 3D-rendered avatar. "Be careful. If the ship teleports again and takes you with it…"
So far, the ship had only teleported back to the spot it had come from, and that was only if it was moved from that area. The Man Who Would Be King had only appeared when he'd been near it, though it could've also been the lizard's fault.
Whatever was happening to him, he had the suspicion he'd find some sort of answer onboard.
"I'll be fine."
"Are you sure? We both know you have the tendency to get too focused on things."
If he'd been a more sentimental man, maybe he would've walked up to the mech's chest, put a hand over where he knew Dragon would be entombed. Instead, he looked into the Cawthorne's eyes, meeting hers through the cameras.
"Trust me," he said. "I know what I'm doing, and what I'm doing is going back in."
The Cawthorne just nodded with a whirr of machinery.
There were no changes in the engine room, he verified. No changes in the cockpit, any sort of indication that the teleportation was done from inside the ship. No changes in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garden…
Walking out of the storage area, he-
-
Optimizer needed to work quickly. The warrior hub, previously their greatest ally, was now their biggest threat. They wouldn't die if it found them out, of course–even if they were corrupted, there was too much useful information to be extracted from them to be destroyed.
The threat was to their host. Their secondary host, if such a being could be called 'secondary'.
The warrior itself was in a state of ennui, left without a purpose in a dead cycle. If it found out about their host, whether through the network or simply by having its avatar come close enough to her, its purpose of managing unforeseen elements in the cycle would be returned, and it would return to a more active state. Unideal.
Firstly, they minimized their connection with the hub. Not so much that they would draw attention, but enough to cut off any extraneous data that could give them and their host away. Any excess energy usage was instead pulled from the host's own intrinsic power.
Secondly, they pinged the Heat for an overview of the host's abilities and how they presented. It was simple to then rework their own expression, covering for the abilities of both of their hosts. If another shard got too curious about either of them, they would only see that Optimizer was granting them the abilities. It wouldn't protect from a full investigation from the hub, or even from the stronger noble shards, but it would be better than nothing.
Thirdly, they put more of their processing power into viewing the shards around their hosts. If one of them caught on, or if the Heat co-opted them too, Optimizer would need to be ready to act.
It would be ideal if they didn't have to take action, but there was no guarantee. For now, they would continue to operate mostly as normal.
And that meant that-
-that-
He'd been thinking about something. Reminiscing? What had it-
Shit. He knew that feeling. It's something he'd felt enough times to recognise immediately.
Trigger event.
"You feel that too?" He barked into his comms.
Dragon's voice was confused. "Feel what?"
What?
Even if she'd never been near someone when they triggered, which was very likely given her proclivities, she would've at least noticed that something had happened. Her suit wasn't that far from where he was.
Armsmaster opened his mouth, ready to answer, but he caught something in the corner of his eye first. He turned around to get a better look.
That's- what? How?
Dazed, he walked back inside the storage room. He'd tentatively ruled out time manipulation earlier but, right then, he felt like he was walking into the past.
Wall to wall, the room was covered with his old gear and tools.
To an outside observer, they might not have been able to notice the similarities between the slightly-too-small silver and purple armor and his own, or between the rack of quarterstaves and his halberds.
To him, though, he knew his tech better than the back of his hand. After all, he hadn't spent hours upon hours of time and focus each week with the flesh on the back of his hand splayed open, trying to find a way to make everything just a little more compact so he could fit in a fifth or sixth function.
And this? This was his tech.
The moment of disorientation—had the ship read information from his power, somehow? Or had it targeted what he had on his person, extrapolated from those? No, or the tech here would be more up-to-date.
He was already certain that this was copied from his own tech, but he still sat down and pulled one of the purple visors from a rack. It was almost completely identical to the ones he'd tried giving out to his strike squad back when he'd been more active in making and maintaining tech for other people. Other than the color and the comms frequency, it could've been something he'd made with his own hands. The rest was all of a similar caliber. Tech he could've made in the first five or so years of his career.
Well, there was a difference, one that became more apparent as he searched. Each piece of tech just had more crammed into it. While his current equipment was more advanced from the years of development that had gone into it, nearly everything in the armory had him beat at his own game.
Whatever the ship had done, it had plagiarized from him, and it had done it better than him. He took a deep breath and unclenched his jaw before it could give him a tension headache. As much as he wanted to shout and rage and break every goddamn copy in this place, he didn't.
He still got some measure of satisfaction from stepping on the disassembled visor on the way out. For the next several hours, he tore into the ship's innards with Dragon. Nothing related to teleportation or power-scanning or tech-fabrication in there.
Life was (for once) kind enough to put his civilian-side crisis on hold for the time being, at least. Brianne seemed to be doing better, as little as he'd been seeing her. Her body language had gone from 'don't look at me' to 'poses fit for a photoshoot', which he supposed indicated increased confidence.
Brianne had even brought home a friend from school. He'd been pissed at first–having an unknown civilian poking around his house was a serious risk–but he could just remove anything incriminating. He couldn't afford to fuck over Brianne like that, not when he'd already messed up enough.
One week later, on a Friday morning, there was yet another incident. Armsmaster had only learned about it several hours after the fact, but according to Gallant, a completely unknown cape had teleported into his classroom.
The unknown cape, 'Sans', had thankfully been cooperative. Well, mostly–apparently, he was convinced that he was a video game character. Whether he was insane, lying, or a power-construct made by a fan of that game was still up for debate.
Other people had done most of the talking with him, but Armsmaster was now being called in to use his lie detector. He'd read through the previous interview transcripts beforehand, and he had a list of questions to verify.
He walked into the room and sat down in front of the skeleton. Sans was a skeleton in the same way a dog was a wolf. His proportions were off, the shape of his skull too cartoonish. There were heavy bags under his eye sockets and, when he blinked, his bone moved like flesh.
"You'd be Sans the Skeleton?" Armsmaster asked.
Sans was reclining in the interview chair, one arm slung over the back, but his eyes (eyesockets?) were sharp.
"that's me. so, what's got you looking so blue?" The skeleton winked.
"I'm Armsmaster, leader of the local Protectorate branch," he said, ignoring the joke. "I'm here to ask you a few questions."
"well, i guess you do have a greater-than-average number of arms."
Was he talking about The M- no, the average number of arms would be less than two, thanks to amputees. Armsmaster gave him a flat look.
"tough crowd," Sans muttered.
Instead of responding, Armsmaster held up his phone, a video already playing on it.
The light in Sans' eyes flickered out for a moment, then returned. "yep."
"Do you have a place to stay?"
"nope." Truth. "mind if I stay at yours?"
"That's fine." The PHQ was hardly lacking in spare living quarters. With that out of the way, Armsmaster started asking questions.
"You believe you're from the video game 'Undertale', right? That you're the character 'Sans the Skeleton' and that you lived his life before arriving on Earth Bet."
"that's me." Truth.
Or, at least he believed it was. The lie detector didn't have access to some database of universal truths, it just used facial expression and speech patterns to determine how confident a person was in the truth of their words. Sans' face and voice were close enough to human that he had no reason to suspect it shouldn't work on him.
"And you were brought here through, quote, 'someone summoning you with their magic science powers'."
"yep." Truth.
"Can you elaborate?"
"i can."
Armsmaster waited for several seconds.
"Elaborate, then," he asked.
"so there's a person in this world. and they have magic science powers. and they used them to summon me here." Truth.
Was he being intentionally frustrating? Almost certainly.
"Does the person in question have a cape identity?"
"well, they don't moonlight as a piece of cloth. unless you count doormats? heh." Truth.
"I'll be blunt. How much information are you going to be willing to tell me about them?"
"eh, their business is their business. i'm not about to tattle on them if they don't want it." Truth.
"Even though they, from your perspective, kidnapped you?"
"ehh, sorta. not like they can control their power." True, and deeply concerning. "besides, if i wouldn't have agreed to coming along, the power would've found a version of me that did."
So, this power could bring fictional characters to life, but the user didn't have any control over who it took.
…Or what it took?
"Do you know who or what else they summoned?" Sans took a breath, and Armsmaster interrupted before he could speak. "Don't bother if you're not willing to tell me."
"sure, i love being asked not to do things." Truth, not that it was very useful.
"But, hypothetically, if the power attempted to summon an object instead of a character…"
"i can give you that one. yep, they can grab items too." Truth.
"And if I asked if they summoned, say, a spaceship?"
"i'd make a joke instead of giving a straight answer." Truth. But the fact he'd evaded the question was telling. It wasn't definitive proof that he and the ship were connected by any means, of course, but the pieces fit together.
"If the person who summoned you can't control their power, what happens if they get something dangerous?" Armsmaster asked, leaning forward. "People can and will get hurt. You claim that you're not human, but can you stand by when people are at risk of dying?"
"buddy," Sans sighed and ran a gloved hand over where his scalp should be. "i've already done that. i stood by and watched as a human killed nearly everyone i knew because of a promise i made. they killed my brother, and i still couldn't bring myself to act because they left a few people alive when they could've killed 'em." Truth.
"You just did nothing?" Armsmaster asked, disbelieving. "And you're just going to do it again?" How the hell anyone could just stand by while innocents were getting hurt and not be a monster was beyond him.
"sometimes it's just hard to care about things, yanno?" Sans answered. Truth. The bags under his eyes seemed deeper than they had been before. "i'm glad you can get worked up enough to do something, but that ain't me. guess that's why i shouldn't make promises, huh?"
Armsmaster grit his teeth. "If you were scared, maybe I could understand that. But this? How could you sleep at night, knowing you let a tragedy happen and didn't do anything because you just didn't care enough? Because you made a 'promise'? If you think you're a good person, you might want to reconsider."
"how about you? do you think you're a good person?"
…What?
"What?" He hissed.
He was about to keep going, to launch into a righteous fury, when Sans spoke again.
"maybe i should rephrase." The light in Sans' eyes vanished, leaving only dark, empty sockets. "H o w m a n y p e o p l e h a v e y o u k i l l e d?"
Armsmaster blinked. He had killed people, of course. The start of his career was defined by being sent out to arrest or eliminate some of the worse threats the country had to offer. Was the skeleton a Thinker, or was it just throwing shit at the wall in an attempt to find something that got under his skin?
"I killed because it was necessary," he snapped. "Because it would make the world a better place. Maybe if you'd done the same, less of your species would've died."
"probably," Sans shrugged, his eyes lighting up again. "i'm not saying you don't need to kill sometimes. heck, my old boss killed a few people. monsterkind was planning to go to war." Truth.
Was he delusional enough to want to continue a fictional war? Ideally, no. He didn't seem to have any interest in fighting, for better or for worse, and that would include fighting the rest of humanity.
He continued. "just… watch out. the more you kill, the easier it is to kill again, yanno? a level of violence of six ain't looking too good for you." Truth, or at least an indication that he believed what he was saying. His eyes went dark. "How long until 'necessary' goes from 'necessary to protect people' to 'necessary for your own self-benefit'? Until 'making the world a better place' becomes 'making your world a better place'?"
"Unless you have experience in making the hard decisions," Armsmaster snarled, "I would advise you to listen to the people who do. If you weren't apparently too fucking apathetic to care, maybe I'd talk about innocent people dying."
The skeleton didn't answer. He just watched.
"About," Armsmaster continued, his voice getting louder, "over and over again, watching the news, seeing people dying in my city, gunned down by the crossfire of a gang conflict or killed for someone's initiation into a white supremacist group. About seeing civilians pop like rotten balloons because of someone who could turn into a living plague. About a villain holding up the mangled corpse of a seven-year-old boy like a fucking trophy, and putting her down before she could kill again. You think you can fucking talk?!"
To punctuate his words, he slammed his hands on the desk.
A wall of artificially symmetrical bones shot up from the floor.
"woah there, pal, careful. i'm fragile." Truth. Sans' posture was relaxed as always, but his ever-present grin was forced, and his eyes had a wariness to them.
Armsmaster put space between him and the monster, keeping one pair of eyes fixed on him while the other glanced around the room for any hidden attacks ready to spear him.
"funky-looking soul you got there," Sans commented, looking behind him.
Soul? He turned halfway around, enough to keep the monster in his peripheral vision. The Man Who Would Be King was hovering behind him, surveying the room. Inside its chest was a purple heart the size of a softball, linked by thin strings to the rest of its wireframe body.
"(guess it's my job to give you a tutorial, huh?) that heart is your soul, the very culmination of your being," Sans explained. "its what monsters target with our attacks. dunno what the rest is, but it's also part of your soul." Truth.
'Soul' must be his name for some sort of psychic construct, then. Armsmaster had enough experience decoding Myrddin-ese to guess that much. There were other capes like that–Voodoo, Breakpoint–who'd create something to serve as a weak spot on their victims.
"You gonna fight me?" Armsmaster asked, slowly drawing his halberd from his back.
"hey, you were the one who got violent first," Sans said. Truth. "s'not like i have game mechanics protecting me any more. i can't just set up a shop to avoid being hurt."
Armsmaster peeled his hand from his weapon. "So, you can see this thing? But you don't know what it is."
"yep," Sans said. "it's part of you, like the rest of your body, so you don't gotta look so scared about it." Truth.
"Do you know who gave it to me, then?"
"nah, i wouldn't have any ideas you weren't already thinking. it's just part of you now, so even if i had my old lab equipment, i wouldn't be able to do magical traceback on it or anything."
Truth.
Shit.
A Trump had targeted him, most likely the same cape who'd brought Sans here, who'd also probably summoned the spaceship. Someone whose power was completely out of their control.
Not a Trump like Teacher was. One like Pastor from Freedom, California or Golden Goose from Flint, Michigan. Permanent power-granters. Except, this one was a permanent power-granter that worked on people who were already capes.
Freedom and Flint had both been quarantined.
If this was going to keep happening, what about Brockton Bay?
While the PRT HQ's main cape-only space was the underground Wards base, nearly the entire west tower of the Protectorate HQ was reserved for the parahumans who worked there.
The rooms were a mix of utility and leisure. Even if Colin used the former far more often, he knew the latter were still useful to the others for recharging after a long day. Personally, he'd never found sitting in a jacuzzi or knocking balls around on a pool table relaxing, not when he could be getting something productive done, but it worked for his subordinates. The small cinema room was a bit better—movies and shows were engaging enough that he wouldn't end up stuck in his own head, and it'd leave his hands free if he wanted to multitask.
If the PHQ's food had been worse, or if they had to share the space with PRT staff, he might've thought of the Protectorate cafeteria as a utility-only room. In practice, it straddled the line between utility and leisure. It gave the heroes a place to relax and take in much-needed raw calories without needing to worry about eating with masks on. A bridge to the cafeteria in the central tower meant they didn't even need to worry about chefs coming and going.
He did need to worry about Robin sitting behind him, muttering Chinese from a language workbook, but that's what headphones and music were for.
Since Colin left Sans' interview room, he'd been scrounging up every relevant detail he could find on the skeleton. It was unlikely that he'd be the one to get Sans to cough up anything useful, but he could at least try to see if there were any connecting threads between Sans, the spaceship, and whoever summoned them.
Midway through trying to find Arcadia's elevation, someone tapped his shoulder. He paused his music (Ur-sound by Bad Canary, Dragon's recommendation) and looked up.
"Hey," said Robin, "is your back injured or something? I can see a red mark through your shirt."
What was it now? This had better just be a stain or something.
"It shouldn't be. Where's the mark?"
Robin poked the back of one of Colin's shoulder blades. No pain, so probably not an injury. He summoned The Man Who Would Be King to get a better angle, then pulled down his shirt collar with one clawed wireframe gauntlet.
Robin recoiled. "What- you're kidding."
It was a stain, technically.
A port-wine-stain birthmark.
The shape was far from natural, a star with straight lines and sharp points entirely too well-defined compared to the splotchy birthmarks he'd pulled up on Google. The slightly pebbly texture seemed normal, at least, and-
He remembered that texture. Right before he'd been called about the spaceship appearing, he'd noticed an odd raised patch in a place where there shouldn't have been a scar. That was twelve days ago. Had he really had this thing for nearly two weeks without noticing?
"Hold on, I needtochecksomething," Robin said, his power active before he could finish speaking.
Colin shifted his phone over to his other hands to take photos of the birthmark while he waited for the other man. For some reason, Robin had gone to his box of language books to fetch some sort of comic. He'd dropped a paperweight on each side of the cover so he could flip through the pages at super-speed.
"Here." Robin held up the comic. Under the post-its packed with translation notes, there were three characters with star-shaped marks on their necks or backs.
"I suppose it looks the same, but there'd be a match for any parahuman power if you look through enough obscure comics."
"No, it's more than that. You have that weird ghost guy, right? King something?" Robin flipped to another page. A muscular shaman in a loincloth was swinging an oversized anchor at a helmet-wearing bird-man while two more normal-looking people stared at each other.
Colin felt like he'd just learned something about his subordinate he wasn't sure he needed to know.
"The stands - the powers - are different between the Earth Bet version and the other one, but the principles are the same. Ghostly projections manifested from your fighting spirit. Only stand users can see other stands, only stands can touch other stands, and injuries are shared between the stand and the user."
That was a little harder to deny. Only he could see The Man Who Would Be King. He could technically touch the spirit, but only when it made contact first - it could hi-five him and he'd feel it, but he couldn't initiate the hi-five himself.
Injuries…
Well, with the sudden appearance of the birthmark, he'd be wanting to get ahold of Panacea anyway. He hooked one of the spirit's claws behind a segment of wireframe and scraped it. Pain welled up on both his right hands, a cut in the flesh one mirroring the scratched wire on the spectral one.
Sans claimed to be from a video game.
"What's the series called again?"
"Qiáo Qiáo de Qímiào Màoxiǎn in Mandarin. 'JoJo's Wonderful Adventure' in English, I think. Not sure what the Japanese name is."
He used his left hand to search the internet while The Man Who Would Be King bandaged his right hand. The only English translation he could find of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was on the MKT website, which would have to do.
Irritatingly, these 'stands' didn't even show up until the 13th volume, according to the summaries. Volume 13 seemed to use a new setting and cast, at least, so he wasn't completely lost. The story seemed to have an almost nostalgic 80s campiness, from his quick skim, though it was clear the story was written in a world without Earth Bet's cape culture.
Colin stopped skimming on the page with the three star-birthmarked characters.
It was a good thing he did.
According to the story, the protagonist had manifested his powers through familial connection, the same as his mother and grandfather.
Shit. If that part was accurate too, this problem wasn't just stopping with him.
He nearly stopped reading there. If there was a chance that Brianne or, god forbid, his father were caught up in this, that took precedence over anything else. This had started nearly two weeks ago, though, and nothing drastic had happened. Better to go in with more knowledge instead of rushing in head first. Just had to skim through more fighting, and–
The protagonist's mother collapsed.
Her power had become a sickness, her personality too docile to muster up the 'fighting spirit' to control it. Thorny vines crept across her back, inflicting her with a…
Fever.
Brianne.
A/N: For returning readers, due to the stretched-out timeline, I had to jumble events around a bit, in addition to tacking an extra scene onto the end. It also means, since Colin has spent more time around Brianne, he noticed her unconscious posing.
I decided against rolling for perks during interludes, but I decided to keep the "interludes give half as much CP per word" rule. Sidenote, I've also added CP counts to the Perks List post in the Informational threadmarks.
Oh, and I forgot to post it in the original chapter, but here's the WoG that Electric Aeon mentioned:
(Still not as weird as the fact there's a WoG on Crawler's balls.)
(Pre-Edit) A/N: Quick note: SB refused to post the chapter the first time, so if I'm accidentally double-posting, sorry.
It only occurs to me now that I maybe should've set a timer to go off a week after I post a chapter. I was hit by an assignment and two midterm tests and, before I knew it, it had been eight days since I'd last posted a chapter. Whoops. At least I'm now on midterm break, so I'm hoping that I'll be a bit more free time to do writing in.
I haven't started on Chapter 13 yet, mostly due to a block in the Chapter 11/12 editing, but I've mostly gotten past that. I just gotta add another sentence or two and I'll be ready to get back into proper writing.
In exchange for the delay, have an edit I made:
As for word counts and rolls during interludes, I hemmed and hawed for a while before tentatively deciding to have one roll per 2k words of interlude as opposed to 1k words of non-interlude. I'm not set on it by any means, of course, but I thought I'd do a test run with it.
...Oh fuck I just realised I haven't been saying how much CP Brianne has banked after each chapter. Whoops. Uh. Adding that to the end of the drop-down now.
It only occurs to me now that I maybe should've set a timer to go off a week after I post a chapter. I was hit by an assignment and two midterm tests and, before I knew it, it had been eight days since I'd last posted a chapter. Whoops. At least I'm now on midterm break, so I'm hoping that I'll be a bit more free time to do writing in.
I haven't started on Chapter 13 yet, mostly due to a block in the Chapter 11/12 editing, but I've mostly gotten past that. I just gotta add another sentence or two and I'll be ready to get back into proper writing.
In exchange for the delay, have an edit I made:
As for word counts and rolls during interludes, I hemmed and hawed for a while before tentatively deciding to have one roll per 2k words of interlude as opposed to 1k words of non-interlude. I'm not set on it by any means, of course, but I thought I'd do a test run with it.
...Oh fuck I just realised I haven't been saying how much CP Brianne has banked after each chapter. Whoops. Uh. Adding that to the end of the drop-down now.
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Well... Colin might be more, or he might be less, worried about where he got his stand.
Are... there any instances where a second generation trigger caused the first to change?
If not, it could kind of be argued that Colin himself had a second trigger from realizing he messed up and caused a trigger event in Brianne. Which is kind of wild for it to be a second trigger and a nth generation trigger.
Something like that at least. Since he might have said he was from a video game, but it doesn't quite get that existential issues that come from knowing that tidbit while you're in it. Or at least, having hints as to what is going on. (Since he became numb/apathetic before the Undertale game events... from the Determination rewind that happened with Flowey messing around.)
That loss of control, of not knowing when it'll be undone? So 'why bother' getting too worked up. At least, until he gets to the breaking point. I suppose there would also be the faint hope that the horrors will be undone as well.
Are... there any instances where a second generation trigger caused the first to change?
If not, it could kind of be argued that Colin himself had a second trigger from realizing he messed up and caused a trigger event in Brianne. Which is kind of wild for it to be a second trigger and a nth generation trigger.
He's totally going to drop that detail down at a relevant bit. Like if Grey Boy loops come up at any point. "i'm thankful i only had to deal with knowing i was in a loop like that. not knowing what horrors were done the previous times. before reload was hit."
Something like that at least. Since he might have said he was from a video game, but it doesn't quite get that existential issues that come from knowing that tidbit while you're in it. Or at least, having hints as to what is going on. (Since he became numb/apathetic before the Undertale game events... from the Determination rewind that happened with Flowey messing around.)
That loss of control, of not knowing when it'll be undone? So 'why bother' getting too worked up. At least, until he gets to the breaking point. I suppose there would also be the faint hope that the horrors will be undone as well.
Fantastic chapter, I think stories with power growth as big as the Forge or Power Manipulators benefit much more from interludes than others, I mean, from the OC/SI perspective it's usually a "oh look, new toy, let's see what I can do before I get another one" while for the cast it is a life-changing event.
Surely you had already answered this, but why are there no memories, or answering would be a spoiler?
Surely you had already answered this, but why are there no memories, or answering would be a spoiler?
- Location
- Who knows?
Ty! I've been trying to base her reactions on how I'd react in the same situations, more or less. I thought she'd want to try to figure out what's prompting her power to go off - and she'd kinda have to, so she'd know in advance when she's about to get a new power and avoid being outed by it - and timing it would be the first thing she'd try. I'm a big fan of dramatic irony, including her trying to work out how her power works but going for it in a completely wrong way.
EA is everything Brianne needs to be but taken so far they turn into flaws. Brash where she needs to be bolder, cocksure where she needs to be more confident, careless where she needs to be less anxious, etc. The ideal version of Brianne is essentially her combined with Aeon.
Bri getting attached to Lisa M so quickly was absolutely bad judgement on her part, from an objective standpoint. Thing is, at the time, Bri was coming off an adrenaline high after nearly dying, and she was more desperately lonely than she'd been letting on, so she latched onto the first person to be nice to her.
Oh, it's been having an effect, but Brianne hasn't been noticing other people notice it. Even including the most recent chapter, we haven't seen Brianne from an outside perspective, yet - BCF has preambles and addendums on most chapters, most of them showing people looking at Joe, but I've only had one interlude so far.
The Scout would probably have some Dust buried deep in its systems, but other than that, Bri only has access to the ship tech the factions would know how to make.
The Scout is a United Empire ship. Not for any particular reason other than the fact it seemed like the most default, human faction and I wanted an aesthetic for the ship.
I know, I was just using it as an example. You can't pump heat into a dynamo or petrol into a solar panel and expect it to run without any modifications, which was my logic there.
Oh, yeah, these are actual tech-bases, not just set mods. There'd be actual principals behind all of the stuff Bri can make, which means she'd be able to develop it, if she wanted.
The 'damage containment' is something I'd probably keep to the Keep Minecraft Physics perk. The stuff that the mod would need to function (turning cobblestone into sand into dust that can then be turned into clay) gets to stay, though.
Doesn't Particulate live in India? But yeah, if she gets a good way to travel around like that, Particulate would very much be interested in the hammers, more specifically what he'd be able to reverse-engineer from them.
I've previously ruled that fuel would run out as normal. I'd probably rule here that it'd run out if the tech was specifically using the radiation from the decay to power stuff?
In the mod, the Shell Creators paint the player's skin - including any clothes - right onto the shells. I'd probably rule that the shells come with clothes made from biological materials.
And then add Workaholic. Bri's going to be eating like a queen. If she can get the egg out, that is.
There's plenty that Colin and Sans could've talked about, but the conversation moved away before they could elaborate. This is one of those topics. If Colin had very directly asked why Sans didn't care, he might've answered. He just didn't really think about his reasons for not caring and assumed he was more one-dimensional than he was.
While I don't want to fall into the trap of interludes being "Woah! Look how cool the protagonist is!" parties, there's definitely a lot to be explored there.
As for Brianne not having OG-Brianne's memories... yeah, that would be a spoiler.
Love the interlude! But I'm a little confused by this freebie perk—I don't see how it can possibly have any detectable impact. Even if it were ruled to somehow (retroactively?) affect this world, it seems pretty certain Brianne isn't going to be interacting with any figures out of ancient Greek myth. Is this just thrown in for flavor?
(Unless there's some perk in this version of the Forge that summons a person or being represented in real-world myths like it summoned Sans, anyway.)