Wait, she can't? Why is that, and/or when did it change?
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
As a point of reference regarding Taylor's range in regards to building height, the tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa at 828 meters at its tip (its top floor, on the other hand, is at 585 meters).
Basically, Taylor can reasonably be expected to sense all parahumans in and immediately around a building she's in if she's paying attention. There are buildings that are over a kilometer long, but not many.
- Location
- Launceston, Tasmania
One possibility is that the portal was not orientated towards her, thus any parahumans were blocked from her senses.
Another possibility is that when the portal opened, there were no parahumans near the other side of said portal for her to sense.
After all, it has been shown that the portals do get made between locations that don't include Doormaker.
Although having the brute dropped onto one of the S9 would tend to disprove that.
It could also be that the portal was only there for a split second (just long enough for the brute to fall through) and Taylor didn't have time to sense anybody on the other side.
- Location
- North
The brute was dropped on Riley's Mom who, while slightly broken, is not a cape in the slightest. Depending on how far Riley was from the ... living room? ... There might have been enough space if they dropped him through another sky before landing in the room.
The brute was dropped on the Siberian, not Riley's mom.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
And while Riley's mom isn't a cape, she was a recipient of a fugue upgrade package, so having somebody dropped on her wouldn't be much of a problem.
- Location
- North
So, the brute was dropped on Sarah instead of Amanda. Still means that they could have dropped him through several skies to terrify him (adding that distance), since we don't know what the note said except something like 'This dude tried to bomb Taylor. Enjoy your new stress ball!'
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
And even if she was standing on top of the Stratosphere Tower she'd still be able to detect any parahuman within 346 meters (1117 ft) of the building's foundation, if they were above surface level.
SanguisAnima
Σ Series Z10/0 Group A 4A-GELU Mk1
- Location
- nowhere important
... I can actually see this happening.
Please let this be canon? (Otherwise I'm content to leave this as headcanon)
- Location
- <CLASSIFIED>
So there was that costume review for cold weather suitability a couple of chapters ago, did they also test the costumes for warm weather suitability? Or are they waiting 'till someone complains that his/her/it's costume is too hot?
'Cause clothing that is good for low/negative temperatures is usually unsuitable for high temperatures.
'Cause clothing that is good for low/negative temperatures is usually unsuitable for high temperatures.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Presumably if a costume failed the "low temp" testing, it was already suitble for warmer seasons. If it passed the testing, it was already suitable for both warm and cold climates for one reason or another.
- Location
- Neptune
I think he wants them to fail the Louisiana or Arizona summer test.
- Location
- <CLASSIFIED>
I want them tested.
Whether they fail or not is isn't all that important to me.
Although I pretty sure that none of the authors I've read Worm fiction from (Wildbow included) have thought about how well their costume designs would work in the summer (or hot climates in general). Skitter's is pretty much guaranteed to cause heatstrokes, Maul's would be marginal for summer days in New England and passabel if not optimal for summer nights (for normal humans) but unsuitable for the summer days in Vegas. Grue's is another heatstroke candidate. Vista's might actually be too cold on summer nights. And Gallant, Dickmaster an Kid Win better have A/C in their armors if they don't want to be cooked...
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
If you're wearing power armor, some sort of climate control is pretty much a requirement. That said, when have superhero/villain costumes ever bowed to the logic of "is this weather appropriate"? The Knightfall storyline retconned Batman as having an unarmored silk costume for summer time (this was introduced late in the storyline). But generally speaking, heroes and villains wear spandex body suits. The female ones tend to wear even less practical outfits. Especially the ones who can fly.
That said, considering it's mainly silk with some armor plating, I'd hazard to guess that Skitter's canon costume would have more issue with the winter then it does with the summer. Especially since it was designed for use at night.
That said, considering it's mainly silk with some armor plating, I'd hazard to guess that Skitter's canon costume would have more issue with the winter then it does with the summer. Especially since it was designed for use at night.
I think you are also forgetting that Maul wears her jacket open. Which would help with the heat. Also, in Vegas, she didn't actually go outside in costume much- just visiting the casinos. Which would have A/C anyway.
Also, Maul is based in New England, so it's scarcely a surprise her costume isn't designed with Vegas weather in mind, as if it was, it would be too cold.
Also, Maul is based in New England, so it's scarcely a surprise her costume isn't designed with Vegas weather in mind, as if it was, it would be too cold.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
To be honest, I've been mostly leaving my coat/jacket open in winter for years. And I typically wear tee shirts all year round. Only if it drops below zero do I zip up my coat. And even then, it's usually just fastening one or two buttons.
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
I'm betting that part of her enhancement package from Amy and Riley seriously extended her range of comfortable temperatures. It's just one of those undocumented features that nobody's thought to check out because the issue never came up. After all, she's been in a range of environments now, and hasn't seemed to note any particular discomfort from the climates, even given that there should have been a couple of times where her normal costume would've had her at least noticing the ambient temperature as too hot or too cold for her outfit.
Chapter 272
Monday morning Taylor found that she wasn't fully recovered from the disruptive weekend, but got up in time to head to the gym anyway. She wouldn't get back into her regular schedule by skipping parts of it, after all. Though she would've been happy to skip Amy hitting her on sight once they were both in the pocket dimension on the way to the PRT building.
"What was that for?" Taylor asked.
Amy rolled her eyes. "For me needing to find out that you'd been attacked in the middle of the night from the news."
"In order to tell you when it happened I would've needed to wake you up, and by the time you were up I wasn't thinking about it. They were more of a threat to my sleeping schedule than anything else."
"And how did you know that at the time? You didn't talk to any of their snarks. What if one of them could make explosives a hundred times more powerful, or had some way of bypassing your force field?"
"The former was negated by me confronting them before they placed them all and the latter would've likely resulted in hitting me and running on the street instead of going after me with explosives while I was sleeping."
Amy grumbled about that, but didn't argue the point while Taylor opened the portal to the PRT building. Vicky had just watched the whole thing, snickering. The three of them went through their workout routine with minimal chatting, though some of that was due to a number of PRT officers also using the gym that morning. It was only when they'd finished eating breakfast that discussion picked up again.
"Hey Taylor," Amy said. "You're busy this afternoon, right?"
Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Why?"
"May I borrow the minivan after school? I want to pick up some things before trying out the kitchen. I figure making some cookies would be a good first pass, before trying some of the more complicated recipes I want to attempt."
"I don't see why not. Should we take it to school so that people can be confused about why I showed up using it but didn't leave with you in it?"
"That works for me."
Students had pestered Taylor with questions about her weekend all day, with and without asking about Ackbar, and she gladly escaped after her last class. She swung by home to drop off her bookbag, then headed to the PRT building. She was grabbing a snack from the Wards kitchen area by the time Amy had made it to the minivan in the school parking lot. Missy arrived at the PRT building not long after, and she'd apparently picked up Midnight from home. Which probably wouldn't be a problem, since she was going to be on console anyway.
"I didn't think you were doing anything here today," Missy said. "Otherwise I'd have expected you to run two patrols, not one with me stuck on console."
Taylor shrugged. "I've got a meeting of unknown length, and then we have three days of working with the Protectorate where you're the only one not slated by them to be on console. I figured it was only fair that you got console today when you're not worrying about it for the next three days. Oh, and I'm also the only one not getting a day off in the next three days, so even if my meeting doesn't run long I'm still taking the rest of the afternoon off."
"Oh. So all of us are scheduled for three out of four days in some way?"
"Yep. No clue what we're doing about Friday going into the weekend, since I'm occupied by things that they once again haven't fully informed me about on Friday and then healing all weekend. We'll have to see how things go between now and then."
"Ah."
Taylor gestured at Midnight. "You planning on playing instead of focusing on the console?"
Missy rolled her eyes. "No, but Midnight has recently decided that the vacuum is an enemy to be attacked. Mom doesn't like that for obvious reasons, and wants to vacuum when she gets home from work."
"So you brought Midnight here so that she doesn't have to worry about that side of things."
"Yep."
"Works for me."
Taylor left Missy to set up and headed for the mailroom to get her package on the way to her afternoon meeting. With any luck she'd have time to modify and install the part this afternoon.
Amy checked her shopping list on her visor. They had flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt already, but they hadn't picked up vanilla as part of their 'general supplies' set. Brown sugar, shortening, and peanut butter were on her list as 'will last well enough'. She'd grab an egg and the small amount of milk she needed from home instead of buying more than she needed. The 'maybe' list included colored sugar, and she needed to decide if she was using chocolate chips in the cookies or something else to put on top of the cookies. Or both, possibly, since she had several variations beyond the absolute base recipe. Though from experience when Crystal was playing with the recipe they knew that peanut butter chips were a waste of time.
Why Crystal had thought that putting peanut butter chips in peanut butter cookies was going to change the flavor enough to be noticeable was still a teasing subject. Amy had no desire to embarrass herself by not learning from that mistake. To help with that, she planned on tasting her own cookies before sharing them with anyone other than possibly Taylor.
Of course, Amy couldn't just grab the few things she needed and run, because she'd also been sent a message asking her to pick up a couple of things for dinner if she was at the store anyway. Which meant that she probably needed a full carriage and not just a hand basket. And now that she paid attention to the list she'd been sent, apparently she was getting milk after all. Well, at least that would ensure that there'd be plenty.
She was halfway through collecting things when she realized that they'd gotten cookie sheets, but no cooling racks. That was going to need to be corrected, but the grocery store didn't carry any. Perhaps she could portal home to drop off what needed to be dropped off, then go pick some up?
In the end she'd find herself getting cooling racks and a selection of oven mitts and pot holders, wondering how they'd missed the latter on the last run.
Taylor suppressed a sigh as Mrs. Cooper came into the meeting room. She was the last to arrive and had been running late, but they could finally start the meeting. They were in a smaller meeting room not normally used for these meetings due to Colin having found the original choice needed a replacement light bulb. Meeting in a room with the choice between 'lights off' and 'intensely flickering light' was less than ideal, so they were a few doors down in one normally used for one on one meetings. They'd dragged a couple of chairs from the other room to turn it into a place that four people could meet, one of them on each side of the smaller table.
Mrs. Cooper sat on the side of the table between Taylor and Director Piggot, across from Colin. "Sorry that I'm late, someone parked a delivery truck in front of the parking garage entrance and caused a bit of a backup."
"We noticed," Director Piggot admitted. "The front desk got a police officer over fast enough to give them a ticket too, though if the driver showed up while the officer was there then the resulting arguing about the ticket probably delayed you further."
"Given that they'd only pulled the delivery truck forward to unblock the parking garage, coupled with the break in traffic I used to cross the street being caused by a tow truck getting into position? I'm assuming that the argument got heated."
Colin shook his head. "Well, at least that's probably one less problematic delivery driver. I can't see them keeping their job after that, especially since I believe we've filed a dozen complaints against them in the past couple of months. Hopefully their replacement is intelligent enough to know where they're not supposed to leave the truck."
"Right," Director Piggot said. "We should get started on the actual purpose of this meeting. Which has expanded a little since it was scheduled. First up, Miss Hebert, anonymous members of the public have expressed concern over the safety of your spider-bot."
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Ackbar is mostly harmless, especially if he hasn't had a chance to throw a web down."
Colin nodded in agreement. "We've even discovered that the mild tranquilizer fluid I provided is less effective after the immune system flu, but I don't feel that providing a more effective alternative is needed at this time."
Mrs. Cooper snorted. "The videos available made it look effective enough, and the complaints flowing into the Youth Guard pretty much require that we investigate."
"The videos available to the public don't quite show that the parahumans attempted to use their own knockout gas on Ackbar, only to get caught by it themselves."
"Oh. So the only reason that the spider-bot did better than a dog might've was because it isn't affected by knockout gas?"
Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Without that Ackbar would've been less effective than a small dog, to be honest."
Director Piggot shook her head. "Right. Well, there's still concern being spread about. You'll need to be careful if bringing the spider-bot out in public, though since the only 'incident' has been while you were being attacked there aren't likely to be any problems. That it can't knock people out by biting them will be put into official reports just to be safe. Next up, however, is the aid you gave to Mycroft while in Las Vegas, coupled with your report on the traffic camera monitoring. That has, unfortunately, caused a leak regarding some of your capabilities."
Patricia blinked at that. "What kind of leak could possibly have resulted from those reports?"
"A couple of them were improperly declassified in the process of action items being created and have raised questions of how she was able to determine the problems in multiple systems on sight. Though the serial number recording was apparently something that should've been obvious to anyone looking at the code, she seemingly didn't, and spotting problematic biases in the machine-learning algorithms of the traffic camera system without accessing the system at all shouldn't have been possible. They only confirmed that she was right earlier today, after spending most of the weekend looking into it."
"At the same time," Colin said. "Good job on explaining your presence aiding Dragon. Needing someone who can strap the security keys to their skin was seen as a wonderful excuse for a helper, and the assumption is that you were chosen specifically because you can get instructions from her own powers when others couldn't."
Director Piggot nodded. "Which is nice, and has dodged the entire issue with the public, but there are a number of people in and working with the PRT that are confused. Chambers is working on possible explanations to cover that up."
Taylor frowned. "I only checked on the traffic cameras after running into Shutdown. Even though I didn't talk to her snark, couldn't we just claim that I figured out that she was doing something to the cameras by doing so?"
Colin leaned forward slightly. "You saw Shutdown before reporting the issue with the traffic cameras?"
"While eating breakfast. She picked up donuts after looking at me oddly."
"I suppose that might explain why they decided to target you as well, and will undoubtedly work as an excuse. Though I'm curious as to why you didn't report that encounter?"
Taylor rolled her eyes. "What form do you use to report that you happened to see a villain showing up in costume and buying donuts while you were in the same establishment eating your own breakfast? She didn't even speak, let alone threaten anyone, and her bodyguards stayed outside."
There was a pause, before Director Piggot snorted. "Right. I don't even want to consider the pile of headaches we'd get if people had to report every time they saw a villainous parahuman doing normal tasks out in costume. Forget what kind of mess you'd get if some of those crazy cape cosplayers are running around. Not reporting that you saw a villain not breaking the law while out on your own free time is perfectly understandable."
Colin nodded, though he seemed to do so slightly reluctantly. He probably thought that not having tracking data from villain sightings was inefficient, but knew not to argue the point. "Hopefully that will be enough to divert suspicion, and it's easy enough to make known to those asking questions. We can even amend the original reports with the contact and let people make assumptions. It doesn't cover the software issue with the money scanning though."
Taylor reached into one of her pouches and produced a couple of serial boards, a battery, and a power brick. A moment later she pulled several cables out of another pouch. "I carry everything I would've needed to interface with the thing to pull software out of it, even if I didn't need to do so. Remind people that I happened to be carrying multiple boards that I needed for interfacing with the prize-drawing machine on my first visit to Las Vegas if needed."
Director Piggot shook her head. "You are probably the least tinker-like tinker on the planet when it comes to these things, but it certainly makes covering that detail up easier. 'She used off the shelf components in a manner consistent with what they were designed for' is certainly not a hallmark of a tinker, and you keep most of your actual tinkering in private. At least when you're not tearing apart something Wrench Wraith built during a press conference, anyway."
"I only did that once, and it was perfectly reasonable to decide that a motorcycle sidecar didn't belong on a jet ski."
"Which is probably the only reason that nobody uses it as an example of why you might be a tinker," Colin said. "She's also gotten better about that kind of thing, and for some reason occasionally goes with Assault to visit daycares and kindergarten classes to see what the kids think of her ideas before building them."
"Which is beside the point," Director Piggot said. "One last thing from the weekend, you were on record as not noting which way the brute that ran away went?"
Taylor shrugged. "I stopped paying attention to him when he jumped off of the helipad. I wasn't about to chase him, and at that point my only real option would've been to shut down his powers. That seemed to be likely-fatal if I had, given that he was in freefall. Focusing on those still on the helipad made more sense to me."
"Okay. I can't really find fault with that, and it isn't like knowing which direction he went at first would be exceptionally helpful in locating him now that he's vanished without a trace. Next up, I'd like to have a quick discussion regarding the coming three days. Speaking of which, before I forget, we'd appreciate it if you could swing by the Rig before going home to take care of injuries Miss Militia received this morning so that she can better prepare for tomorrow afternoon."
Taylor blinked, because she hadn't heard of anything happening that would cause injuries. "What happened?"
"Countdown miscalculated how powerful a grenade she was testing would be," Colin answered. "Miss Militia happened to be standing in the wrong place when it went off and took a hit to her arm."
"Ah. I suppose that wouldn't be difficult to take care of before I work on other things."
"Thank you," Director Piggot said. "Now then, as for the goals for the coming days..."
Amy carefully measured out one and three quarters cups of flour and added it to the mixing bowl. She followed that with half a cup of sugar and half a cup of brown sugar, making sure to pack the latter down while measuring it. A teaspoon of baking soda and half a teaspoon of salt followed. She probably didn't need to, but she mixed those a bit before adding a half cup of shortening, a half cup of peanut butter, her measured at home two tablespoons of milk, a teaspoon of vanilla, and the one egg she'd grabbed from home.
She knew not to turn the mixer on to full speed right away, starting off slowly and speeding up a bit as things combined. Eventually she had a properly mixed dough that was the right consistency for forming into balls. She set up cookie sheets next to her and made sure her two resealable plastic containers of mixed normal and colored sugar were next to her, then started making balls out of the dough. Each ball was then rolled in one of the sugar mixtures before being placed on one of the cookie sheets. At home they'd make no more than two sheets at a time, swapping them out, but she didn't have a helper. However, she did have extra cookie sheets and was willing to do the extra cleaning up. She still only needed three for the single batch.
The oven was reading three hundred seventy five degrees, so she slipped the first cookie sheet in. Five minutes later the second went in, to provide a buffer between pulling sheets out, but the third would have to wait for the first to come out as there were only two racks in the oven. With that done, she took a minute to ensure that her bowl filled with little chocolate snowmen was ready, though after checking the bag she ate one. She only needed forty-eight and the bag had fifty-six, and she'd unwrapped them all.
Eleven minutes after the first sheet had gone in, and on her third check of it, she pulled it out of the oven and immediately started pushing little snowmen into the cookies, one each. Once that was done, and another extra snowman eaten, she quickly transferred the cookies onto a cooling rack. Only then did she put the third sheet of cookies into the oven. A few minutes later she repeated the dance with the second sheet, and not long after that she finished with the final sheet.
Everything looked good, which she'd have been annoyed about if it hadn't. She'd helped make these in several variations for years at this point. Vicky could probably handle making them on her own too by now. But doing things alone meant that she had to do the cleanup as well. Ensure the oven is turned off, seal up and put away the colored sugar mixes for possible use in the coming week or two, start rinsing things to prepare for washing them. She had to wait a little longer to start washing, mainly to allow the cookie sheets to cool properly. They couldn't even be safely sped up by dropping them into water as they weren't supposed to be submerged.
Taylor sighed as she headed for the tinker workshop inside of the pocket dimension. She'd gotten a lot of worthless information on what they wanted to do for the next three days. Basically, each Protectorate team was going to work on 'potential new strategies' for the Ward they were working with, and Takara was getting two shots because she was so new to being a parahuman in general. The only truly useful detail was that it wasn't going to be actual patrols, but 'simulated' patrols with PRT squads out of uniform to play the 'bad guys'.
Related to that, Taylor and Missy weren't likely to be given an easy job of things while with Takara, so much as they would have to deal with whatever the Protectorate members threw at them and keep an eye on Takara at the same time. Taylor going first on that front was solely because she was Wards leader, but had the added benefit that she actually could pay attention to multiple things at once to handle that.
After that she'd done as she said she would and popped over to the Rig to heal Hannah. That hadn't taken her long, in fact the longest portion of it was filling out the paperwork for having done so. Which Hannah helped her with, if only to get out of the clutches of the doctors faster. That left plenty of time before dinner to begin working on the shotgun. She hadn't brought any of the provided ammo for it with her, admittedly, but that was okay. It wasn't like she trusted anyone to load it right now anyway. There was a brief moment where she actually wondered about handing it to Takara before fixing it, only to dismiss it immediately. The girl's snark made functional firearms explode already, there was no need to hand her one that was liable to explode without her powers.
She'd gotten the shotgun apart and was halfway through modifying the purchased component when Amy wandered in. "Am I interrupting anything?"
"Don't get too close while I'm welding," Taylor warned. "But other than that I'm just making this shotgun safer."
"I'd expect you to be making it safe."
"It's a firearm. To make it safe would defeat the purpose, but I can at least make it less likely to go off when the user isn't expecting it to."
"Okay, point. Anyway, I made cookies. Want one?"
Taylor thought about that for a moment. "I assume that you tried one already?"
Amy snorted. "Of course. What do you take me for, the kind of chef that insists on force-feeding others their food without trying it themselves? That way lies madness and food poisoning. And probably regular poisoning, for that matter."
"Right. Give me a moment to finish this."
It didn't take long for Taylor to finish and shut off the welder, at which point she set the modified part aside. She was going to have to run it through a few heating and cooling cycles to get it to the proper state now that she'd welded it, but that was going to take a little more time than she had before dinner and she wasn't willing to let the automated furnace run without someone being in the general area. At the same time, she doubted that her father would mind if she spent some time taking care of that after dinner.
Once she'd ensured that the work area was safe, or at least as safe as it could be with a partially-dismantled shotgun on it, she walked over to where Amy had put down a plate of cookies. Looking over them, Taylor rolled her eyes. "Snowmen are oddly appropriate for a 'half-melted' look."
Amy shrugged. "I figured it was worth a try, and didn't really think that the normal things we use don't really have any detail to lose to melting."
Taylor picked one of the cookies up and checked the bottom. "It does look like you didn't burn them, which is better than my father accomplishes most of the time."
"I burned one of the three sheets a little, but Vicky likes them burnt so it isn't a complete loss. We can't let her be in charge of removing them from the oven at home because she leaves them in too long on purpose."
Nodding, Taylor bit into the cookie. These ones had been pulled out of the oven at the perfect time, or so it appeared, though as she continued into the chocolate snowman she wasn't sure about the slight mint flavor in the chocolates. "I'd go with a more normal chocolate next time, to be honest."
"Yeah, I like mint chocolate, but it clashes a little bit with the peanut butter. I wasn't thinking about that when I grabbed them."
"Slightly off choice of chocolates aside, not bad. When are you getting to the more daring attempts?"
"Probably over vacation, assuming I can find a couple of the harder to get ingredients. There's a store in Empire territory that claims to carry a couple of them, I just have to decide if I go on my own, drag you along, or actually tell someone else in New Wave that I want to go and see how many of them object."
Taylor shrugged. "Vicky would probably go with you before telling anyone else, provided that you let her know you wanted to somewhere other than at home."
Amy gave Taylor a look. "Other than at home?"
"I suspect her knee-jerk reaction will involve yelling before realizing that she's being an idiot."
"Okay, yes, I can see that. Crystal and Eric would probably react similarly, honestly, though Eric would get in trouble for going with me."
After dinner, and a couple more cookies from the plate that Amy had sent home with her, Taylor returned to the workshop to ensure that her welds and the surrounding metal were consistent and less prone to sudden failures. Most of that was handled by the automatic furnace while she made adjustments to other portions of the mechanisms in the shotgun, mostly dealing with minor damage that had been done due to the misfires and cleaning things properly where the misfires had left odd residues. When all was said and done for the evening she still didn't have an assembled shotgun, needing to wait for the part she'd modified to cool and settle properly before she could install it. Finishing up would thus have to wait for another day.
Back home, curiosity got the better of her and she checked what was generally available on what was happening with Shutdown and friends back in Las Vegas. Which apparently wasn't much; they were being held on charges relating to attacking Taylor and two of the four had confessed to wanting to pressure her to leave town with 'minor damage' to the roll-out unit. None of them had admitted to anything else actionable. There was even a note stating that screwing up the people-tracking algorithm in the traffic camera system wasn't actually illegal as they'd been doing so without hacking the system, no matter if they'd admitted to it or not, but no real information on what else they might've been up to.
Not that 'attacking an out of costume Ward with possible intent to kill` wasn't bad enough, of course. Then there were all the secondary things tied to that. Trespassing and multiple counts of attempted vandalism, illegal possession of explosives, and for some reason they'd gotten a littering charge included. No court date had been set yet, but that wasn't entirely surprising either. Luckily, regardless of when things happened on that front, they weren't likely to want to bring Taylor in to testify against them. Visor footage, security camera footage, and two of them confessing was likely to land all four of them in jail for a bit. The last one might be a bit harder due to having gotten away, and if caught would likely get more time as he'd actually fired at Taylor with stated intent to kill.
Checking on other things, apparently the Youth Guard had moved quickly, issuing a statement that Ackbar wasn't any more of a threat than a small dog. Worded in a way that implied 'unless you were a threat to Taylor', admittedly, but PHO had picked up on it. They'd also decided that even a small dog can be a significant threat to someone attacking their owner, so the spider-bots were likely no worse than a small dog on that front. Just less legally regulated, as one poster had pointed out. Which had caused the thread to devolve into an argument on the fairness of needing to pay to register dogs but not other pets, except for those pointing out that some areas required the same for cats, and then there were all the other pet types not covered.
Though she wondered about the thread speculating on where the brute who ran away was. 'Might as well try and join the Nine if they want to avoid prison' was an interesting take on things, and the moderators weren't entirely sure what to say about it. That most other villain groups wouldn't want someone that the Protectorate would likely show up in force to arrest as soon as he was spotted was a good point, and they'd even gotten a federal warrant for his arrest issued so that could happen. Assuming, of course, that he lived long enough to be arrested.
Amanda sighed as she looked over the incredibly mangled corpse. "What did you two do wrong? He was fine this morning, and I don't think he was allergic to the eggs I made for him."
"Too many different bone marrows thanks to the added limbs," Riley replied. "I think we got at least three different blood types mixing, on top of battling immune systems that didn't like each other. In the end it meant that everything lost."
"Awww. So no freaky excessively-limbed spider-like-brute for your next run?"
"Well, not with this one at least. I might have to sort my spare body parts by blood type at a minimum, but dealing with battling immune systems going forward will be interesting too. At least if I don't just replace them with stronger ones in the next attempt. I'll have to see what Mary thinks too, I suppose."
"I see, it is nice to keep your friends in the loop when working with them."
"I don't suppose you're okay with me asking William and Sarah to catch some wild boars?"
Amanda blinked. "I don't think I have a problem with that, but I'm curious as to why you want some?"
"Tori asked if Mary and I could make spider-pigs and I want to see if we can pull it off, and Mary thinks that it would screw with people even more if I made a better immune system for them so that they'd carry less pathogens around."
"Oh. I'll definitely have to convince Jacob to let you work on both of those, because they both sound hilarious to watch from the sidelines. It's too bad that you probably can't make breeding spider-pigs though, at least not without someone else's help."
Riley nodded. "Yeah. Getting Taylor or Amy to help would almost certainly work, but I doubt that they'd go for it."
"What was that for?" Taylor asked.
Amy rolled her eyes. "For me needing to find out that you'd been attacked in the middle of the night from the news."
"In order to tell you when it happened I would've needed to wake you up, and by the time you were up I wasn't thinking about it. They were more of a threat to my sleeping schedule than anything else."
"And how did you know that at the time? You didn't talk to any of their snarks. What if one of them could make explosives a hundred times more powerful, or had some way of bypassing your force field?"
"The former was negated by me confronting them before they placed them all and the latter would've likely resulted in hitting me and running on the street instead of going after me with explosives while I was sleeping."
Amy grumbled about that, but didn't argue the point while Taylor opened the portal to the PRT building. Vicky had just watched the whole thing, snickering. The three of them went through their workout routine with minimal chatting, though some of that was due to a number of PRT officers also using the gym that morning. It was only when they'd finished eating breakfast that discussion picked up again.
"Hey Taylor," Amy said. "You're busy this afternoon, right?"
Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Why?"
"May I borrow the minivan after school? I want to pick up some things before trying out the kitchen. I figure making some cookies would be a good first pass, before trying some of the more complicated recipes I want to attempt."
"I don't see why not. Should we take it to school so that people can be confused about why I showed up using it but didn't leave with you in it?"
"That works for me."
Students had pestered Taylor with questions about her weekend all day, with and without asking about Ackbar, and she gladly escaped after her last class. She swung by home to drop off her bookbag, then headed to the PRT building. She was grabbing a snack from the Wards kitchen area by the time Amy had made it to the minivan in the school parking lot. Missy arrived at the PRT building not long after, and she'd apparently picked up Midnight from home. Which probably wouldn't be a problem, since she was going to be on console anyway.
"I didn't think you were doing anything here today," Missy said. "Otherwise I'd have expected you to run two patrols, not one with me stuck on console."
Taylor shrugged. "I've got a meeting of unknown length, and then we have three days of working with the Protectorate where you're the only one not slated by them to be on console. I figured it was only fair that you got console today when you're not worrying about it for the next three days. Oh, and I'm also the only one not getting a day off in the next three days, so even if my meeting doesn't run long I'm still taking the rest of the afternoon off."
"Oh. So all of us are scheduled for three out of four days in some way?"
"Yep. No clue what we're doing about Friday going into the weekend, since I'm occupied by things that they once again haven't fully informed me about on Friday and then healing all weekend. We'll have to see how things go between now and then."
"Ah."
Taylor gestured at Midnight. "You planning on playing instead of focusing on the console?"
Missy rolled her eyes. "No, but Midnight has recently decided that the vacuum is an enemy to be attacked. Mom doesn't like that for obvious reasons, and wants to vacuum when she gets home from work."
"So you brought Midnight here so that she doesn't have to worry about that side of things."
"Yep."
"Works for me."
Taylor left Missy to set up and headed for the mailroom to get her package on the way to her afternoon meeting. With any luck she'd have time to modify and install the part this afternoon.
Amy checked her shopping list on her visor. They had flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt already, but they hadn't picked up vanilla as part of their 'general supplies' set. Brown sugar, shortening, and peanut butter were on her list as 'will last well enough'. She'd grab an egg and the small amount of milk she needed from home instead of buying more than she needed. The 'maybe' list included colored sugar, and she needed to decide if she was using chocolate chips in the cookies or something else to put on top of the cookies. Or both, possibly, since she had several variations beyond the absolute base recipe. Though from experience when Crystal was playing with the recipe they knew that peanut butter chips were a waste of time.
Why Crystal had thought that putting peanut butter chips in peanut butter cookies was going to change the flavor enough to be noticeable was still a teasing subject. Amy had no desire to embarrass herself by not learning from that mistake. To help with that, she planned on tasting her own cookies before sharing them with anyone other than possibly Taylor.
Of course, Amy couldn't just grab the few things she needed and run, because she'd also been sent a message asking her to pick up a couple of things for dinner if she was at the store anyway. Which meant that she probably needed a full carriage and not just a hand basket. And now that she paid attention to the list she'd been sent, apparently she was getting milk after all. Well, at least that would ensure that there'd be plenty.
She was halfway through collecting things when she realized that they'd gotten cookie sheets, but no cooling racks. That was going to need to be corrected, but the grocery store didn't carry any. Perhaps she could portal home to drop off what needed to be dropped off, then go pick some up?
In the end she'd find herself getting cooling racks and a selection of oven mitts and pot holders, wondering how they'd missed the latter on the last run.
Taylor suppressed a sigh as Mrs. Cooper came into the meeting room. She was the last to arrive and had been running late, but they could finally start the meeting. They were in a smaller meeting room not normally used for these meetings due to Colin having found the original choice needed a replacement light bulb. Meeting in a room with the choice between 'lights off' and 'intensely flickering light' was less than ideal, so they were a few doors down in one normally used for one on one meetings. They'd dragged a couple of chairs from the other room to turn it into a place that four people could meet, one of them on each side of the smaller table.
Mrs. Cooper sat on the side of the table between Taylor and Director Piggot, across from Colin. "Sorry that I'm late, someone parked a delivery truck in front of the parking garage entrance and caused a bit of a backup."
"We noticed," Director Piggot admitted. "The front desk got a police officer over fast enough to give them a ticket too, though if the driver showed up while the officer was there then the resulting arguing about the ticket probably delayed you further."
"Given that they'd only pulled the delivery truck forward to unblock the parking garage, coupled with the break in traffic I used to cross the street being caused by a tow truck getting into position? I'm assuming that the argument got heated."
Colin shook his head. "Well, at least that's probably one less problematic delivery driver. I can't see them keeping their job after that, especially since I believe we've filed a dozen complaints against them in the past couple of months. Hopefully their replacement is intelligent enough to know where they're not supposed to leave the truck."
"Right," Director Piggot said. "We should get started on the actual purpose of this meeting. Which has expanded a little since it was scheduled. First up, Miss Hebert, anonymous members of the public have expressed concern over the safety of your spider-bot."
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Ackbar is mostly harmless, especially if he hasn't had a chance to throw a web down."
Colin nodded in agreement. "We've even discovered that the mild tranquilizer fluid I provided is less effective after the immune system flu, but I don't feel that providing a more effective alternative is needed at this time."
Mrs. Cooper snorted. "The videos available made it look effective enough, and the complaints flowing into the Youth Guard pretty much require that we investigate."
"The videos available to the public don't quite show that the parahumans attempted to use their own knockout gas on Ackbar, only to get caught by it themselves."
"Oh. So the only reason that the spider-bot did better than a dog might've was because it isn't affected by knockout gas?"
Taylor nodded. "Yeah. Without that Ackbar would've been less effective than a small dog, to be honest."
Director Piggot shook her head. "Right. Well, there's still concern being spread about. You'll need to be careful if bringing the spider-bot out in public, though since the only 'incident' has been while you were being attacked there aren't likely to be any problems. That it can't knock people out by biting them will be put into official reports just to be safe. Next up, however, is the aid you gave to Mycroft while in Las Vegas, coupled with your report on the traffic camera monitoring. That has, unfortunately, caused a leak regarding some of your capabilities."
Patricia blinked at that. "What kind of leak could possibly have resulted from those reports?"
"A couple of them were improperly declassified in the process of action items being created and have raised questions of how she was able to determine the problems in multiple systems on sight. Though the serial number recording was apparently something that should've been obvious to anyone looking at the code, she seemingly didn't, and spotting problematic biases in the machine-learning algorithms of the traffic camera system without accessing the system at all shouldn't have been possible. They only confirmed that she was right earlier today, after spending most of the weekend looking into it."
"At the same time," Colin said. "Good job on explaining your presence aiding Dragon. Needing someone who can strap the security keys to their skin was seen as a wonderful excuse for a helper, and the assumption is that you were chosen specifically because you can get instructions from her own powers when others couldn't."
Director Piggot nodded. "Which is nice, and has dodged the entire issue with the public, but there are a number of people in and working with the PRT that are confused. Chambers is working on possible explanations to cover that up."
Taylor frowned. "I only checked on the traffic cameras after running into Shutdown. Even though I didn't talk to her snark, couldn't we just claim that I figured out that she was doing something to the cameras by doing so?"
Colin leaned forward slightly. "You saw Shutdown before reporting the issue with the traffic cameras?"
"While eating breakfast. She picked up donuts after looking at me oddly."
"I suppose that might explain why they decided to target you as well, and will undoubtedly work as an excuse. Though I'm curious as to why you didn't report that encounter?"
Taylor rolled her eyes. "What form do you use to report that you happened to see a villain showing up in costume and buying donuts while you were in the same establishment eating your own breakfast? She didn't even speak, let alone threaten anyone, and her bodyguards stayed outside."
There was a pause, before Director Piggot snorted. "Right. I don't even want to consider the pile of headaches we'd get if people had to report every time they saw a villainous parahuman doing normal tasks out in costume. Forget what kind of mess you'd get if some of those crazy cape cosplayers are running around. Not reporting that you saw a villain not breaking the law while out on your own free time is perfectly understandable."
Colin nodded, though he seemed to do so slightly reluctantly. He probably thought that not having tracking data from villain sightings was inefficient, but knew not to argue the point. "Hopefully that will be enough to divert suspicion, and it's easy enough to make known to those asking questions. We can even amend the original reports with the contact and let people make assumptions. It doesn't cover the software issue with the money scanning though."
Taylor reached into one of her pouches and produced a couple of serial boards, a battery, and a power brick. A moment later she pulled several cables out of another pouch. "I carry everything I would've needed to interface with the thing to pull software out of it, even if I didn't need to do so. Remind people that I happened to be carrying multiple boards that I needed for interfacing with the prize-drawing machine on my first visit to Las Vegas if needed."
Director Piggot shook her head. "You are probably the least tinker-like tinker on the planet when it comes to these things, but it certainly makes covering that detail up easier. 'She used off the shelf components in a manner consistent with what they were designed for' is certainly not a hallmark of a tinker, and you keep most of your actual tinkering in private. At least when you're not tearing apart something Wrench Wraith built during a press conference, anyway."
"I only did that once, and it was perfectly reasonable to decide that a motorcycle sidecar didn't belong on a jet ski."
"Which is probably the only reason that nobody uses it as an example of why you might be a tinker," Colin said. "She's also gotten better about that kind of thing, and for some reason occasionally goes with Assault to visit daycares and kindergarten classes to see what the kids think of her ideas before building them."
"Which is beside the point," Director Piggot said. "One last thing from the weekend, you were on record as not noting which way the brute that ran away went?"
Taylor shrugged. "I stopped paying attention to him when he jumped off of the helipad. I wasn't about to chase him, and at that point my only real option would've been to shut down his powers. That seemed to be likely-fatal if I had, given that he was in freefall. Focusing on those still on the helipad made more sense to me."
"Okay. I can't really find fault with that, and it isn't like knowing which direction he went at first would be exceptionally helpful in locating him now that he's vanished without a trace. Next up, I'd like to have a quick discussion regarding the coming three days. Speaking of which, before I forget, we'd appreciate it if you could swing by the Rig before going home to take care of injuries Miss Militia received this morning so that she can better prepare for tomorrow afternoon."
Taylor blinked, because she hadn't heard of anything happening that would cause injuries. "What happened?"
"Countdown miscalculated how powerful a grenade she was testing would be," Colin answered. "Miss Militia happened to be standing in the wrong place when it went off and took a hit to her arm."
"Ah. I suppose that wouldn't be difficult to take care of before I work on other things."
"Thank you," Director Piggot said. "Now then, as for the goals for the coming days..."
Amy carefully measured out one and three quarters cups of flour and added it to the mixing bowl. She followed that with half a cup of sugar and half a cup of brown sugar, making sure to pack the latter down while measuring it. A teaspoon of baking soda and half a teaspoon of salt followed. She probably didn't need to, but she mixed those a bit before adding a half cup of shortening, a half cup of peanut butter, her measured at home two tablespoons of milk, a teaspoon of vanilla, and the one egg she'd grabbed from home.
She knew not to turn the mixer on to full speed right away, starting off slowly and speeding up a bit as things combined. Eventually she had a properly mixed dough that was the right consistency for forming into balls. She set up cookie sheets next to her and made sure her two resealable plastic containers of mixed normal and colored sugar were next to her, then started making balls out of the dough. Each ball was then rolled in one of the sugar mixtures before being placed on one of the cookie sheets. At home they'd make no more than two sheets at a time, swapping them out, but she didn't have a helper. However, she did have extra cookie sheets and was willing to do the extra cleaning up. She still only needed three for the single batch.
The oven was reading three hundred seventy five degrees, so she slipped the first cookie sheet in. Five minutes later the second went in, to provide a buffer between pulling sheets out, but the third would have to wait for the first to come out as there were only two racks in the oven. With that done, she took a minute to ensure that her bowl filled with little chocolate snowmen was ready, though after checking the bag she ate one. She only needed forty-eight and the bag had fifty-six, and she'd unwrapped them all.
Eleven minutes after the first sheet had gone in, and on her third check of it, she pulled it out of the oven and immediately started pushing little snowmen into the cookies, one each. Once that was done, and another extra snowman eaten, she quickly transferred the cookies onto a cooling rack. Only then did she put the third sheet of cookies into the oven. A few minutes later she repeated the dance with the second sheet, and not long after that she finished with the final sheet.
Everything looked good, which she'd have been annoyed about if it hadn't. She'd helped make these in several variations for years at this point. Vicky could probably handle making them on her own too by now. But doing things alone meant that she had to do the cleanup as well. Ensure the oven is turned off, seal up and put away the colored sugar mixes for possible use in the coming week or two, start rinsing things to prepare for washing them. She had to wait a little longer to start washing, mainly to allow the cookie sheets to cool properly. They couldn't even be safely sped up by dropping them into water as they weren't supposed to be submerged.
Taylor sighed as she headed for the tinker workshop inside of the pocket dimension. She'd gotten a lot of worthless information on what they wanted to do for the next three days. Basically, each Protectorate team was going to work on 'potential new strategies' for the Ward they were working with, and Takara was getting two shots because she was so new to being a parahuman in general. The only truly useful detail was that it wasn't going to be actual patrols, but 'simulated' patrols with PRT squads out of uniform to play the 'bad guys'.
Related to that, Taylor and Missy weren't likely to be given an easy job of things while with Takara, so much as they would have to deal with whatever the Protectorate members threw at them and keep an eye on Takara at the same time. Taylor going first on that front was solely because she was Wards leader, but had the added benefit that she actually could pay attention to multiple things at once to handle that.
After that she'd done as she said she would and popped over to the Rig to heal Hannah. That hadn't taken her long, in fact the longest portion of it was filling out the paperwork for having done so. Which Hannah helped her with, if only to get out of the clutches of the doctors faster. That left plenty of time before dinner to begin working on the shotgun. She hadn't brought any of the provided ammo for it with her, admittedly, but that was okay. It wasn't like she trusted anyone to load it right now anyway. There was a brief moment where she actually wondered about handing it to Takara before fixing it, only to dismiss it immediately. The girl's snark made functional firearms explode already, there was no need to hand her one that was liable to explode without her powers.
She'd gotten the shotgun apart and was halfway through modifying the purchased component when Amy wandered in. "Am I interrupting anything?"
"Don't get too close while I'm welding," Taylor warned. "But other than that I'm just making this shotgun safer."
"I'd expect you to be making it safe."
"It's a firearm. To make it safe would defeat the purpose, but I can at least make it less likely to go off when the user isn't expecting it to."
"Okay, point. Anyway, I made cookies. Want one?"
Taylor thought about that for a moment. "I assume that you tried one already?"
Amy snorted. "Of course. What do you take me for, the kind of chef that insists on force-feeding others their food without trying it themselves? That way lies madness and food poisoning. And probably regular poisoning, for that matter."
"Right. Give me a moment to finish this."
It didn't take long for Taylor to finish and shut off the welder, at which point she set the modified part aside. She was going to have to run it through a few heating and cooling cycles to get it to the proper state now that she'd welded it, but that was going to take a little more time than she had before dinner and she wasn't willing to let the automated furnace run without someone being in the general area. At the same time, she doubted that her father would mind if she spent some time taking care of that after dinner.
Once she'd ensured that the work area was safe, or at least as safe as it could be with a partially-dismantled shotgun on it, she walked over to where Amy had put down a plate of cookies. Looking over them, Taylor rolled her eyes. "Snowmen are oddly appropriate for a 'half-melted' look."
Amy shrugged. "I figured it was worth a try, and didn't really think that the normal things we use don't really have any detail to lose to melting."
Taylor picked one of the cookies up and checked the bottom. "It does look like you didn't burn them, which is better than my father accomplishes most of the time."
"I burned one of the three sheets a little, but Vicky likes them burnt so it isn't a complete loss. We can't let her be in charge of removing them from the oven at home because she leaves them in too long on purpose."
Nodding, Taylor bit into the cookie. These ones had been pulled out of the oven at the perfect time, or so it appeared, though as she continued into the chocolate snowman she wasn't sure about the slight mint flavor in the chocolates. "I'd go with a more normal chocolate next time, to be honest."
"Yeah, I like mint chocolate, but it clashes a little bit with the peanut butter. I wasn't thinking about that when I grabbed them."
"Slightly off choice of chocolates aside, not bad. When are you getting to the more daring attempts?"
"Probably over vacation, assuming I can find a couple of the harder to get ingredients. There's a store in Empire territory that claims to carry a couple of them, I just have to decide if I go on my own, drag you along, or actually tell someone else in New Wave that I want to go and see how many of them object."
Taylor shrugged. "Vicky would probably go with you before telling anyone else, provided that you let her know you wanted to somewhere other than at home."
Amy gave Taylor a look. "Other than at home?"
"I suspect her knee-jerk reaction will involve yelling before realizing that she's being an idiot."
"Okay, yes, I can see that. Crystal and Eric would probably react similarly, honestly, though Eric would get in trouble for going with me."
After dinner, and a couple more cookies from the plate that Amy had sent home with her, Taylor returned to the workshop to ensure that her welds and the surrounding metal were consistent and less prone to sudden failures. Most of that was handled by the automatic furnace while she made adjustments to other portions of the mechanisms in the shotgun, mostly dealing with minor damage that had been done due to the misfires and cleaning things properly where the misfires had left odd residues. When all was said and done for the evening she still didn't have an assembled shotgun, needing to wait for the part she'd modified to cool and settle properly before she could install it. Finishing up would thus have to wait for another day.
Back home, curiosity got the better of her and she checked what was generally available on what was happening with Shutdown and friends back in Las Vegas. Which apparently wasn't much; they were being held on charges relating to attacking Taylor and two of the four had confessed to wanting to pressure her to leave town with 'minor damage' to the roll-out unit. None of them had admitted to anything else actionable. There was even a note stating that screwing up the people-tracking algorithm in the traffic camera system wasn't actually illegal as they'd been doing so without hacking the system, no matter if they'd admitted to it or not, but no real information on what else they might've been up to.
Not that 'attacking an out of costume Ward with possible intent to kill` wasn't bad enough, of course. Then there were all the secondary things tied to that. Trespassing and multiple counts of attempted vandalism, illegal possession of explosives, and for some reason they'd gotten a littering charge included. No court date had been set yet, but that wasn't entirely surprising either. Luckily, regardless of when things happened on that front, they weren't likely to want to bring Taylor in to testify against them. Visor footage, security camera footage, and two of them confessing was likely to land all four of them in jail for a bit. The last one might be a bit harder due to having gotten away, and if caught would likely get more time as he'd actually fired at Taylor with stated intent to kill.
Checking on other things, apparently the Youth Guard had moved quickly, issuing a statement that Ackbar wasn't any more of a threat than a small dog. Worded in a way that implied 'unless you were a threat to Taylor', admittedly, but PHO had picked up on it. They'd also decided that even a small dog can be a significant threat to someone attacking their owner, so the spider-bots were likely no worse than a small dog on that front. Just less legally regulated, as one poster had pointed out. Which had caused the thread to devolve into an argument on the fairness of needing to pay to register dogs but not other pets, except for those pointing out that some areas required the same for cats, and then there were all the other pet types not covered.
Though she wondered about the thread speculating on where the brute who ran away was. 'Might as well try and join the Nine if they want to avoid prison' was an interesting take on things, and the moderators weren't entirely sure what to say about it. That most other villain groups wouldn't want someone that the Protectorate would likely show up in force to arrest as soon as he was spotted was a good point, and they'd even gotten a federal warrant for his arrest issued so that could happen. Assuming, of course, that he lived long enough to be arrested.
Amanda sighed as she looked over the incredibly mangled corpse. "What did you two do wrong? He was fine this morning, and I don't think he was allergic to the eggs I made for him."
"Too many different bone marrows thanks to the added limbs," Riley replied. "I think we got at least three different blood types mixing, on top of battling immune systems that didn't like each other. In the end it meant that everything lost."
"Awww. So no freaky excessively-limbed spider-like-brute for your next run?"
"Well, not with this one at least. I might have to sort my spare body parts by blood type at a minimum, but dealing with battling immune systems going forward will be interesting too. At least if I don't just replace them with stronger ones in the next attempt. I'll have to see what Mary thinks too, I suppose."
"I see, it is nice to keep your friends in the loop when working with them."
"I don't suppose you're okay with me asking William and Sarah to catch some wild boars?"
Amanda blinked. "I don't think I have a problem with that, but I'm curious as to why you want some?"
"Tori asked if Mary and I could make spider-pigs and I want to see if we can pull it off, and Mary thinks that it would screw with people even more if I made a better immune system for them so that they'd carry less pathogens around."
"Oh. I'll definitely have to convince Jacob to let you work on both of those, because they both sound hilarious to watch from the sidelines. It's too bad that you probably can't make breeding spider-pigs though, at least not without someone else's help."
Riley nodded. "Yeah. Getting Taylor or Amy to help would almost certainly work, but I doubt that they'd go for it."
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- Location
- Here
I think this word was left out accidentally.
And tinkertech cookies should be a thing! Even without powers chefs have done some insane dessert designs.
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
1. Add the flour last
2. 350 degrees, not 375, which is too high
3. chocolate snowmen? Tell me more.
2. 350 degrees, not 375, which is too high
3. chocolate snowmen? Tell me more.
- Location
- California, USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Why are they being careful about Maul revealing her ability to understand technology? I thought that was public knowledge after the last Ziz attack.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
To an extent, when baking the order you combine the dry ingredients doesn't matter as much as how you combine them. Flour is usually the item you're using the most of. So it's often the first thing added to the bowl. If the recipe calls for sifting the flour, this is typically the first thing added. And sifting or not sifting the flour can have an impact. For one thing, it takes more unsifted flour to fill an identical measuring cup. Also, it matters if you pack the measuring cup or not. But when you added the flour, not as vital. Usually.
The really big thing is to combine all the dry ingredients before adding the wet ones. And often you should add the wet ingredients while you are mixing. That said, adding the wet ingredients all at once then mixing is also a valid strategy with some recipes.
- Location
- In front of the fairy
Why would that be embarrassing or something to tease over? Chips could change the consistency, peanut butter concentration in particular places, and yes, even the flavor to some extent if the peanut butter in the chips is sufficiently different from the peanut butter used in the cookies as a whole. Sure there's a good chance it won't make a noticeable difference, but it's worth trying and only a complete ass would tease someone over a failed attempt.
Bad Amy. No cookie.