[] Give Lacey the Infinite Enhancement template
Cloudy Skies 11.9
Monday, July 4
The Fourth of July get-together the Dockworkers turned former Privateers chose to put on is, you have to admit, a smashing success. It is probably due in no small part to the fact that it is not just the Privateers who are here. When everyone settled in Philadelphia, not everyone stuck around past the first couple of weeks, instead deciding that a city with a working port meant regular jobs that did not involve getting in fights with villains. The schism within the Privateers about how to fight later led the non-murderous ones to get in touch with those old buddies of theirs in the search for regular work while the more aggressive guys almost all died to Fairyland's wrath.
When they decided to throw this little bash, they invited not just the team from Brockton Bay but also several of their new coworkers. The coworkers passed the word along, wives and kids got roped in, and now it is a substantial group that has overtaken basically the entire apartment building that Alexander and several other of the guys live in. It is a very good thing that this is a potluck-type party because otherwise you would feel sorry for whomever had to feed this horde.
Still, while it is successful on its own terms, you are not exactly excited to be here. Part of it is that you have no one your age to talk to; most of the kids that came were in the ten to twelve range, and the few guys who were eighteen and nineteen were dockworkers themselves and so were engaged in those conversations. The other part, and more honestly the larger part, is that even though you are more comfortable with adults than with fellow teenagers, you still have nothing to talk to them about. It is not as if anybody here was someone you could talk to about fighting crime, and Tim is the only other mage here. Samantha came with you but then promptly hid herself, citing her ears and tail as valid reasons why it was best she not be visible in human form and the kids as reason she was not about to risk herself in pet form.
Sighing, you toss your empty paper plate and wander through the crowd. There surely has to be something somewhere that can hold your attention.
At one point you spot Tim deep in conversation with another Brocktonite and looking distressed, and you send him a burst of telepathic curiosity. He glances over at you and shakes his head; whatever it is, he seems to have it under control. Instead you eventually find yourself in the kitchen, where Lacey and a few of the other men's wives are cleaning serving dishes and cooking utensils. Lacey is in the back, so instead of calling out and interrupting the other women's conversation you project, «
Need some help?»
She startles and looks around before she finally spots you. Whatever she says next is lost in the hubbub, and she instead waves at you to come over and join her. "I won't say no to another pair of hands," she tells you as she hands you a set of pans to wash. You dunk them into the sink full of soapy water and are already scrubbing them when she quietly adds, "I'm actually a little jealous you can do that."
"Telepathy?" She nods. "You can do it too, you know. You did it before, even if you were just whispering. You just need to work on sending it loud enough to be heard."
"And what happens if I do get to that point? I won't start spilling out all my thoughts to everyone around me, will I?"
«
Telepathy is intentional. I don't know if you can do it accidentally,» you state with a shake of your head. «
You have the first step down already. I told you before that telepathy is like speaking your thoughts to someone just without moving your mouth; well, when you don't have anything boosting your telepathy, it's more like trying to talk to someone on the other side of this room, with everyone still talking and drowning you out. It isn't just a matter of shouting, either. You have to project your voice in that direction.
«
Of course, it is much easier with a Device helping out. It's been a while since we talked about it, but have you thought any more about whether you want one or not?»
"Some, now and again," she admits. "I'm just worried. If I take one, aren't I basically agreeing to go out and get into fights? Or sit around building stuff like Tim does? I don't want to do either of those."
"You aren't required to do anything, Lacey. You could get it and never once use it as anything besides a phone. Or you can do something else with it." You take another look at the people around you; no one seems to be eavesdropping, but that doesn't really matter if you start talking openly about magic in front of them. «
There are other things you could do with it besides fighting and building. There's a guy in New York we made a Device for, and that was so he could go out and heal people like Panacea used to do in Brockton Bay. Or like another hero we talked to, you could use it just to create a Guardian Beast like Samantha. Or use telekinesis to be the fastest bagger your manager has ever seen.»
She gives you an unamused look at that comment, though her disapproval is ruined by the smile peeking out at the edges of her mouth. What is not so funny is the reality of Lacey and Kurt's finances. Even with him working on the docks again and her working as a cashier, you know from snippets of conversation Samantha overheard that they are still living primarily off the money Kurt obtained while the Privateers were active. Joining the Wards yourself would do little good, and Samantha refuses to leave your side in part because of the trouble that seems to follow you, but a third 'adult' who could earn money, potentially through the Protectorate? It is a possibility. «
At the very least, it would give you protection with a Barrier Jacket so if you got caught up in a carjacking or a mugging or something, you'd be safe until Samantha or I could get there. Philly isn't anything near as bad as Brockton Bay was, but bad things still happen.»
"You two look like you're in a serious conversation," Tim says, walking up in the now mostly empty kitchen. "Anything us menfolk need to be worried about? Planning to take over the world or something?"
"Taylor's trying to sell me on the advantages of a Device. I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it," Lacey tells him.
He shrugs. "I can't speak for you, obviously, but I don't I regret it at all. It's a whole lot more interesting than trying to find money where there wasn't any or doing corporate taxes. Getting to work with Dragon of all people is also a—" The green watch at his wrist, which you are pretty sure he never had before, begins beeping. "—plus…"
This time it is Tim who looks around, and when he's sure that no one is watching – partly because you shift around to block anyone from seeing – he taps the face of Sextant's new standby form to pull up a video feed showing the frowning face of the very Tinker he mentioned. "Now's not a great time—"
"Oh, is it not a good time? I'm so sorry." Dragon's biting sarcasm catches both Tim and you off-guard.
"If you can spare me a moment, take a look at what I've been dealing with for the last hour." She flips the feed around so it acts more like a video camera and points it to another part of the room. For a moment nothing happens, then with a screech one of the feathered critters Tim had you help him catch on the Enforcers' world runs around the corner. It flaps its wings and hops around, but no matter what it does it cannot dislodge the white fairy hanging on to the red feathers around its neck and back and giggling madly.
Someone snorts, and Lacey and Tim's looks at you tell you exactly who it was who did it.
"I'm too small to catch one of these things, Tim, and I don't have Cassiel's telekinesis to make up for it. Pardon my language, but get your ass back here and fix this."
The screen vanishes, leaving the three of you in silence.
"I, uh, I should probably—"
"Yeah, you might want to get over there now."
Tim gives you and Lacey a quick wave before he's not quite running – but certainly moving quickly – to the front door.
Lacey laughs and shakes her head. "Are they always like that?"
"Not normally. I think Dragon just finally reached the end of her tether."
"It sounds like you guys have a lot of fun, then." She gnaws on her lip for a couple of seconds. "If I do accept one of these Devices, I won't have to get into fights or anything?"
"I promise. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."
She takes a long inhale. "Alright. If you make one for me, I'll take it."
If you make one for her. You keep yourself from rolling your eyes. You don't have anything else you had planned for the week, so rather than asking Tim to build her something, you might as well give her the Infinite Enhancement template. Perfect Storm recovered from making Tim's Gadgeteer template a while ago.
And you might as well get started on it now.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thursday, July 7
Cool air brushes over your wet, naked skin and wakes you up from a fever dream. You open your eyes and look over at the mostly dark inside of the Immortal Assimilation Engine's empowering chamber. You are pretty sure that isn't what it's actually called, but you don't know the name for this room that only appears to suck your Linker Core dry when you want to try making a template. Your everything hurts, which is unfortunately not a surprise considering last time, but you are not quite as worthless as you were the last time you went through this.
"Any problems?" you croak.
"Negative," the deep and emotionless voice of the Lost Logia replies.
"Device bearing Infinite Enhancement template created without complications."
That's a plus, at least. "Can you dry me off and give me my clothes back before you dump me out on the floor this time?"
Someone, you assume either Samantha or Tim, was more forward-thinking than you were and laid out a thick blanket in front of the door so you have something besides the concrete floor to lay on while the Immortal Assimilation Engine folds back up into Perfect Storm. Even then, you still take a few more moments to try working out all your kinks as you stare up at the ceiling of Dragon's Vancouver base. This was the safest place to situate yourself when you are as vulnerable as template creation makes you, but as you go back over things you realize you might have forgotten to ask her if she had a problem with it. Most of that was because you did not want to bother her when she was still in a mood regarding Tim and Cassiel and his feathered dinosaurs – apparently those creatures were what velociraptors actually looked like, though they are nothing like what you have seen before in movies – but now that you're out and talking you should probably offer her an apology for monopolizing her space like that.
«
Storm, where are Tim and Dragon?»
Your Device points you in the direction of the main lab, and you slowly make your way over only to open the door and walk into a crowd. You are used to seeing Dragon and Tim on their own, but that is not the case now. Both of the Tinkers are present, but with them and being taken on what might be a tour of the lab are two tall, thin people in lab coats who are dogging Tim's heels as though afraid he is going to leave them on their own; from the long brown feathers on the woman's head and the short red feathers slicked back on the man's, not to mention the lack of any visible hair including eyebrows, you are mostly confident these must be Tim's brand new Guardian Beasts. Lacey is also here, surprisingly, sitting in a chair and talking to Vista, who has Cassiel sitting on her shoulder and chattering with the both of them.
Samantha, still in her normal raccoon form, looks up at your entrance and pads her way along the table to hop into your arms. «
Welcome back.»
«
Good to be back. I hate going into that thing.» You nod your head at everyone else in the room. «
Has it been this busy from the moment I went in, or is this a new thing?»
"Taylor, you're back!" Lacey says, now noticing you.
«
New thing. I brought Lacey here to get her Device, and Tim was already bringing Vista over to give her that new project of his.»
The teleportation bracelet, that's right. You remember that he and Dragon had been talking about it for a while, that considering how much work he had done on Vista and how there was no predicting when he would need to do maintenance on her prosthetics it would be easier to make a beacon for her so she could signal their teleportation pad and come and go at her leisure. The fact that it gives her someplace to go when she is upset with the Protectorate's restrictions is a complication, but not one that should overshadow the convenience of having access to her 'doc' at a moment's notice when something goes wrong.
You give Lacey a wave and wander over. "I guess I kind of forgot to mention that becoming a mage comes with membership into our crazy circus, didn't I?"
"Yes, you did," she says with a smile. "But it could be worse, I suppose. Is it finished, then?"
A flash of orange light deposits a violet crystal egg into your hand. "Catch."
The moment the egg completes its descent into her hands, her body breaks apart into a halo of purple light that finally fades to reveal her Barrier Jacket. Unlike your witch costume and Tim's basic lack of costume, Lacey's is vaguely Asiatic in theme. A purple cloth mask covers the lower half of her face and leads to a pastel robe with barely visible white designs running down the right side. The robe ends at her upper thighs to reveal white pants and white strappy sandals with wedge heels.
Lacey turns around and plays with the wide sleeves for a moment. "Well," she eventually says, "I guess no one is ever going to mistake me for myself, are they?"
"
I think you look good," Vista says in a tone that dares anyone to contradict her. "You'll need a name if you ever talk to the Protectorate, though. And…" She looks around at you and Tim and the Guardian Beasts. "And honestly, you guys need a team name."
"A team name?" asks Tim. "Why? We've been doing just fine without one so far."
"Yeah, but that when it was just you and Calamity Witch and Samantha. Now there are
six of you, not counting Dragon and Cassie. Three Tinkers, two face-punchers, and—" She looks over at the newest mage. "Um, what exactly are your powers now, Mrs. Weller?"
"I told you, just call me Lacey. I think this is supposed to give me more of a supportive role of some kind?" she asks, to which you nod.
"Okay, and a support cape. Six capes is a bunch, even if half of you are Tinkers. It's as many as the Philly Protectorate has until the new guy comes on board."
That is news to you. "New guy?"
"Yeah. I don't know much about him other than that he's a him, he's a Mover, and he'll be joining the Wards. Which means we have yet another person who sits around and won't be allowed to do anything," she adds with a darkening scowl. "Anyway, you have a big team now, and I bet Lacey can create a Guardian Beast of her own in the future, too, can't she?"
You nod.
"So jealous."
"It isn't all fun and games," Tim points out. "Especially with two of them. If you aren't strong enough, it puts a strain on your magic something fierce. It's a good thing I don't go around using spells that much, because I'm feeling it."
"Does it hurt?" you ask.
"More just it's really uncomfortable."
"Mistress," Perfect Storm chimes in,
"apologies for interruption. Message left by Legend two days ago requesting meeting. Reason unstated."
"Ah," Dragon says quietly. "That reminds me that I need to build prototypes of the Dragon's Teeth armor. I have been meaning to do that, but retrofitting my previous suits for mana generation was taking up most of my time. I'll need to do that soon. Plus pulling the Simurgh's body out of the ocean."
"What?!" Vista and Lacey both shout.
While Dragon feeds the pair the same story of psychic lobotomization that she said she was giving the Protectorate, Samantha taps you on the shoulder and crooks her finger for you to follow her to a nearby window. "Thought you might want to see the kind of stuff Tim gets up to when you aren't here to supervise him," she says with a grin.
Supervise? You never supervise him. You wouldn't even know where to start— "What the hell is that?"
A short distance outside is a dome of… something. You can't tell what it is, but there is a clear delineation of a half-sphere where the inside just doesn't look right. It isn't until you look near the base and see swirls of dirt and sand that have somehow forgotten to fall to the ground that you realize what happened. "Did he… freeze time?"
"Technically it was Bakuda who figured out how to stop time," Tim says as he and his Guardian Beasts walk up behind you. "I was trying to figure out how it worked when I… maybe kind of armed it. We figured a controlled detonation was better than letting it go off here in the lab. On the plus side, I know how to reverse engineer it."
"You
want to build time-stopping bombs?" you can't help but ask.
"No no no. When I said reverse engineer, I meant back to first principles. I know how she managed to manipulate time, so now I can try applying the same process in different ways to do stuff like slow down or speed up time in more controlled circumstances. Theoretically, anyway," he adds.
That is not the strangest thing you have ever heard. You have a spell to slow down time all on your own, and you get the feeling that speeding it up is not beyond your capabilities. Still, the idea that he can do so and make it replicable brings in a whole new wrinkle. Especially since you 'rescued' a total of five of Bakuda's bombs from her base in Chicago. "Have you started analyzing the other bombs?"
"Not yet, but that's on the to do list. Which just keeps getting longer and longer," he grumbles. "I swear, it's like I can't get finished with something before I have more ideas for other stuff. Tinker's curse, I suppose, but at least it means I won't be out of a job for a long while."
"Temporal Manipulation" added to Tim's character sheet.
+1 Inspiration to Bind Mine.
Firefly and Nostromo's character sheet added.
Cost to buy skills for Tim is now DOUBLED.
Lacey's character sheet added.
Unison Devices' character sheets updated.
"Bracelet teleportation beacon" added to Vista's gear.
Time to figure out Tim and co.'s build slots for the week. Yes, and co. The raptors are loose in the lab. Please refer to THE RULES for more information, and take 24 HOURS to think it over.
