Friday morning Taylor started her day discussing the weekend with her father.
"So you're going to take them up on their offer and drop your roll-out bedroom on a Casino rooftop?" he asked as they had a light breakfast.
"That's the plan," Taylor replied. "Instead of bouncing back and forth across time zones."
"Will I need to take care of Ackbar, or are you planning on popping back for that?"
"Amy mentioned that as well, and since my appointment for going to Las Vegas isn't until later tonight she decided that we should kit out the kitchen in the pocket dimension. Then I can take Ackbar with me and not bother you with time-shifted use of the kitchen here, and it isn't like I need the extra time that they gave me off to finish schoolwork before the weekend."
He nodded. "I see. Why not just borrow the few things you'd need?"
"Because I think she wants to try a couple of recipes and Mark won't let her take over the kitchen at home."
"Ah. So you'll be going shopping this afternoon, then heading to Las Vegas this evening, and probably coming back sometime Sunday afternoon?"
She nodded. "Yep."
"Okay then. Do your best to enjoy yourself while there, even if most of what you're there to do is 'work'."
"I'll try."
"Oh, and don't forget to pick up potatoes here, I'm willing to bet that they're a lot more expensive in Las Vegas."
Preparing for the weekend and the impending shopping trip that now included aside, Taylor also looked over PHO while in the gym. Apparently people felt that her PHO ratings needed something appropriate for 'do not attack in groups' based on her ability to 'Hollywood handgun', but they couldn't decide how to word it. They'd even rejected 'Hollywood handgun' as a name, because it didn't give the 'right vibe'. Outside of that, there was a lot of discussion on the actual difficulty of things and whether or not it had been a 'valid test of relative skill'. In particular, people thought that Missy had been slightly cheated, since she normally used a sniper rifle and this was a very different kind of shooting.
Moving on from that, Taylor looked over some of her other messages and found that she had a notice from the PRT. It seemed that they'd officially upped her Accuracy Blaster rating, or rather granted her an unconditional point and brought the conditional point up from 1 to 2. The extra conditional point was still for 'hit twice with a single shot' and the unconditional point was for the new 'impossible aiming skills' on the assumption that it worked with anything she could project off of. Presumably they'd done the same for Amy, but that wasn't explicitly stated in the message that they'd sent, and Amy hadn't gotten a similar notice.
Arriving at school brought lots of questions about the previous day's show, and two different teachers had Taylor show that she was carrying both handguns with her. Both teachers showed their own handguns, and one of them spent ten minutes talking about the differences between their handgun and Taylor's two. Amy had a couple of teachers show their own handguns as well, though neither of them went into a discussion of differences. Most of that got posted on PHO by other students as soon as the repeaters turned on at lunch.
"Have you two been getting pestered all day?" Missy asked as she sat down with her lunch.
"One of Taylor's teachers described differences in handguns," Amy answered. "Mine just showed theirs off."
"Huh. None of mine mentioned having their own handguns, but I was thinking more in the hallways."
Taylor shrugged. "I rarely answer questions yelled at me, so people don't even get annoyed when I ignore them."
"Oh."
"Hey guys," Louise said as she sat down next to Amy. Her tail was wrapped up in bandages, which got Taylor's attention, and apparently Amy's as well.
Amy sighed. "What happened to your tail this time?"
Louise blinked, then looked behind her at her tail. "Oh, right. Forgot about the bandages that mom made me use after she vacuumed up my tail last night."
Taylor turned to look at the girl. "What?"
"Neither of us was paying proper attention and my tail was halfway into the vacuum before things jammed to the point of failure."
"Oh."
"Whatever, we both learned lessons and it wasn't even hurting this morning. I'm more interested in how many guns everyone actually has."
Missy sighed. "Why?"
"Because 'guns you carry normally' and 'guns you own' aren't always the same category? I know Taylor has at least that rifle thing that she previously showed off, but now I'm curious as to what other ones are kicking around in people's safes."
"I'm probably boring on that front," Amy admitted. "Just the one handgun, though I suppose that's probably due to a lack of people giving me guns. Unlike Taylor, who started to resort to giving guns away."
Taylor gave Amy a mild glare for commenting on that, though most of the table probably missed it due to Missy speaking up and grabbing their attention. "Yeah, she gave me a neat sniper rifle recently."
Of course, that brought attention back to Taylor, who sighed. "Yes, I have more guns. An incredibly dangerous shotgun, three more handguns, and another sniper rifle."
"Oooh," Louise said. "Does the shotgun shoot something incredibly powerful?"
"Not really, it's more that it discharges too easily."
Dennis turned their way at that. "How easily are we talking?"
"I currently refuse to hold the shotgun and shells at the same time, even if I haven't loaded them into it."
That led to a bunch of stares, but Louise was the first to recover. "You have three more handguns?"
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Yes. Two of which I can't use."
"Why not?"
"They're too small for my hands."
Vicky frowned at that. "Why would someone give you guns that are too small?"
Taylor shrugged. "They were left to me in a will. Butcher killed the guy's kids, I'm assuming they weren't old enough for a full-sized gun when that happened."
That was enough to kill the discussion, though Taylor noted that it did make it onto PHO before lunch ended.
Taylor and Amy swung by their homes after school to drop off their bags, then met up in the pocket dimension so that they could take the minivan shopping. They ended up leaving by way of the Dallon household, it being better positioned for heading to the department store. Arriving at the store was met with minimal fanfare, and they lucked out by getting a parking space incredibly close to the door.
Their first stop was looking at countertop appliances, blenders to start with but they quickly moved on to other things. Toasters, mixers, popcorn poppers, and other things were looked at, though they didn't get everything available as they didn't see themselves using them all. From there they moved to pots, pans, and other cookware. A standard set was easy enough to pick out, but then they needed other things as well. Amy wanted cookie sheets, and Taylor insisted on a proper griddle pan. Except that they couldn't find one in the store, and ended up grabbing a tabletop griddle instead. They also found ice trays along the end of the aisle and picked up some that they liked.
From there they moved to mixing and measuring bowls, cups, spoons, and related things like spatulas and turners. Any measuring equipment that didn't have both metric and imperial units was noted for either correcting with custom labeling or ordering the metric version from elsewhere as well, at Amy's insistence. Apparently one of the recipes she wanted to try came out of Europe and she didn't want to be doing conversions all the time. They also ended up with wooden, metal, and plastic mixing spoons for varying purposes, and almost forgot to get rolling pins.
That led into deciding on plates, bowls, cups, and silverware. Most of which was 'what style do we want?' rather than anything else. They'd both agreed on multilayer glass plates, bowls, and serving dishes, but Taylor preferred unpatterned and Amy preferred a vintage floral pattern. In the end they got a full set of each, because they shouldn't have any problem finding places to put the extras. They went with a combination of somewhat matching glass, stoneware, and plastic cups and mugs of varying shapes for different purposes, and grabbed two full sets of silverware in the same style because they both hated mismatched sets and thus it made sense to have plenty of extras.
Knives and related items were next, and Taylor vetoed Amy's initial choice of kitchen knife on the basis that it was crap quality. They got a pile of steak knives to go with their silverware sets, as well as a different basic set of kitchen knives to tide them over, but Taylor ordered a much better set from the PRT store for longer-term use. They also picked up a couple of different peelers and found a nice ice cream scoop at the end of the aisle, but found that the selection of kitchen shears left a lot to be desired. They were added to the 'buy from the same tinker that produces kitchen knives' shopping list in the PRT store instead.
Salt and pepper shakers were next, except that Taylor insisted on getting a dozen additional glass shakers that could be used to pre-mix specific things if they weren't being used as spare salt or pepper shakers. She was hoping to laser-etch labels on some, others would probably just get temporary labels written on tape. Both of them agreed on getting a pepper mill, but disagreed on the actual style. At least until a quick discussion revealed that they preferred different varieties of peppercorn, at which point they got multiple pepper mills so that each could be dedicated to a different variety. Again, likely to be laser-etched at some point.
Dish and hand soaps were next, along with drying mats and a multi-tiered drying rack. Cabinet organizers were also picked out at that point, as well as some other useful cleaning tools. Reusable but eventually disposable dish wipes were picked up, as well as longer-use washcloths and hand towels. Sponges with and without abrasive pads included, plus standalone abrasive pads, were also thrown into one of the carts they were using, as well as other supplies for cleaning around the kitchen.
They then looped back through other sections to pick up things that they'd realized they'd missed or just plain skipped over and forgotten to go back to on the first pass. Butter dishes, strainers, a cheese slicer that an employee was restocking and thus hadn't been there on their first pass, a meat tenderizer, and a meat thermometer were added to their selection before they decided that if they'd missed anything they could come back later.
A manager confirmed that they weren't paying with cash, then opened a checkout lane for them due to their multiple shopping carts full of intended purchases. They went through it all reasonably quickly, given the amount involved, and were offered help loading it all into their vehicle. Only for Taylor to laugh.
"There's no way we're loading this into the minivan," Taylor said.
"Er, okay," the manager said. "Then where are you putting it all?"
"We'll just open a portal door," Amy answered, causing the manager to blink in realization. "You don't mind if we borrow the shopping carts for a few minutes while we empty them, do you?"
"No, no, not at all, so long as you return them. And don't cross the red lines along the outer edge of the parking lot, as that will lock a wheel up on each cart."
Taylor nodded. "That won't be a problem."
Unloading everything into the kitchen, in piles on the floor and countertops, didn't take them long, and they returned the shopping carts to one of the corrals in the parking lot. They then headed for the grocery store. Amy wanted to get all of the 'essentials', but Taylor rightfully pointed out that they weren't going to be living out of the kitchen for a few weeks to use them up. Salt, the peppercorn varieties, various spices and such that would last reasonable amounts of time when stored properly, flour, sugar, and potatoes were gathered for now. Other things could be brought in as they were needed. Those were all carried out in bags, and they pulled the minivan directly into the pocket dimension from the parking lot.
Unpacking purchases and the initial washing of pots, pans, dishes, silverware, and so forth took most of the rest of the afternoon before they split up. Both headed home, Amy for dinner and Taylor to do some quick packing and grab Ackbar to put him into her roll-out bedroom. It didn't take long for Taylor to decide to just move a pile of her 'summer' clothing into the roll-out bedroom for now, since she was mostly wearing the 'winter' clothing at this point anyway. A few things didn't fall into either category, admittedly, but moving some of it over was easy enough.
A quick goodbye to her father was followed by heading for the Rig via pocket dimension portal, and half an hour later she arrived in the Protectorate building in Las Vegas. Dragon was already there and waiting for her when she arrived.
"Good evening," Dragon said. "You appear to have packed very lightly."
Taylor shrugged. "Do I have any reason to have a bag with me if I'm rolling an entire bedroom onto a roof?"
"I suppose not."
"So which roof is being used for this? I'm under the impression that it's one of the actual casinos and not the Hero Memorial Hotel."
Dragon nodded. "Yes, one of the casinos having problems has a helicopter pad that isn't in use due to nearby construction making helicopter flights in and out too dangerous. An express elevator connects to it and it should be able to hold five times the weight of the roll-out unit without issue."
They took a PRT van to the casino, where Taylor was given an ID card that would let her get in and out of the building, into several staff areas, and up to the helicopter pad on the roof. They made their way up there to get things situated. The helicopter pad actually had enough room for three different helicopters to land, and Taylor was asked to use the area furthest from the 'open view' so as to make it easier in case they had to bring a helicopter in for medical reasons. She had no reason to argue about that and rolled out her bedroom unit facing the rest of the pad so as to have an actual view out the windows. That took a few minutes, at which point she essentially had something similar to a penthouse room that happened to require passing outside to get in and out of the building proper. It also had locks that the hotel staff couldn't open, which was a good thing in her book.
Dragon took off from the roof to head back to the Hero Memorial hotel, where she was staying in her personal suite, and Taylor headed into her bedroom unit to check on Ackbar. The spider-bot was obviously confused, but was also recovering. He also seemed eager to explore outside of the bedroom unit, but Taylor wasn't about to let him explore outside. Instead she ensured that he didn't make it out of the room, then got her moped out of the pocket dimension. She'd checked the menu for the restaurant in the casino already and decided that she wasn't interested today, so instead she was going to pick up dinner further out.
Saturday morning Taylor woke up very early, though not really much later than usual. Being three hours off of her normal time was annoying, but she'd deal with it. She took some time to enjoy the view out of the windows, once she'd opened up the curtains and blinds, before closing things up just in case someone had a camera of some kind pointed her way. She would hope not, but wasn't in the mood to give anyone a show by changing with the blinds open.
A quick trip into the pocket dimension was all that was needed to prepare breakfast for Ackbar, which resulted in a slightly longer trip for cleaning up afterwards since everything that they'd left out to dry the day before could be put away properly now. With that done, she ensured that she had everything she needed for the day and headed into the casino proper. Despite doing a pile of other things first, she was still very early for breakfast, so she took the stairs down instead of the elevator to waste time and get in at least a little exercise without a gym visit.
Actually arriving downstairs, she found that she still had the better part of an hour to go before breakfast would be available in the casino, but the man at the front desk gave her directions to a semi-nearby donut shop that was apparently quite good and already open at this hour. She walked over, found that the donuts weren't as good as advertised but the fritters were great, and people-watched while eating. Initially she was just watching the various locals, who barely gave her a first glance let alone a second one, but then she switched to paying attention to the three parahumans that approached together. Two notably stopped outside, on either side of the doors but not really 'in sight' from inside, and the third entered.
The woman was in costume, a pale red suit with a glittery mask covering her eyes. She made a quick visual pass over those sitting with their food just after the door shut behind her, then started walking towards the counter. Three steps in she stopped, her foot still off of the ground in mid-step, and turned to look at Taylor. Deciding that 'hiding' wasn't exactly an option, Taylor instead gave a little wave and took another bite out of her nearly-finished fritter. The woman stared for a moment, then shook her head and resumed her trek to the counter. Money exchanged hands, and the woman left with a box of donuts. Interestingly, at least to Taylor, no words had been spoken. Walk in, hand over money, get her change and a box of donuts in return, walk out. If it hadn't been for obviously recognizing Taylor the entire thing would've only taken a minute and a half, tops.
All three parahumans left the area together, heading back the way they came, and Taylor idly started looking through PRT records for any parahumans that had a costume that looked like the woman's. She actually made it halfway back to the casino before finding the right entry, the woman being listed as a recently-revealed minor villain named 'Shutdown'. Supposedly she could come up with instructions that would allow anyone to trigger a failure in any given system, though what little evidence they had showed that she was possibly hindered by tinkertech. For the past two months she always traveled with at least two bodyguards, though they had even less information on them. In fact, the files didn't even state that said bodyguards were parahumans.
Notably, given that by all available evidence her power appeared to be entirely thinker, the PRT was under the impression that something was seriously wrong with the fact that she went out in costume at all. Normal profiling would indicate that she would be best used out of costume, kept as an unknown that couldn't be tracked before handing instructions to someone else on her team, yet she was very frequently seen out and about in her fairly obvious costume. Theories included that it was a distraction, power requirements of some kind, or that she was sandbagging in some way and had other abilities.
Whatever the case was, she was rated as a low direct threat but was tracked whenever she was out and about. In fact, traffic cameras were tracking her now, and Taylor looked up at the nearest one out of curiosity. Her tinker snark eagerly dug into the network a bit, and that had her frowning. Tracking of 'persons of interest' was a learning algorithm built into the network, but the algorithm was currently becoming a bit too biased. A quick message to the PRT should hopefully allow them to get that taken care of.
Taylor looked over the secure box of biometric security keys, then selected the one that they needed for this casino from the collection. They were on the second casino of the day, and they'd discovered that the override security keys had been mislabeled. Possibly intentionally, but Dragon had needed to fetch the entire collection. The first casino's systems had been easy enough to deal with, but had required using a backdoor to shut the malfunctioning security system down. At that point Dragon was able to handle the actual component replacement, swapping out the entire security scanner interface module, though Taylor 'assisted' and fixed up a couple of other things in the area at the same time. Several other components had been replaced at the same time, hopefully with ones that wouldn't fail as quickly.
This casino was going to take slightly more work. The same interface module was having problems, but as of this morning had failed to the point where the vault wouldn't open at all. The easily accessed back door to shut things down was inside the vault, so they were going to need to work around that a bit differently. Sadly, the easiest solution also meant Taylor had to do more work, because Dragon couldn't work around the fields preventing people from figuring the tech out.
Taylor had taken off both her belt and gloves before strapping the correct key to her arm with some velcro straps, then grabbed the replacement interface module. Trying to open up the system while it was active and locked down would normally set off all the alarms, but so long as the security key was in contact with her skin and remained close enough to the 'fault point' the system would allow it. Even then, she still had to bypass four different physical switches as she went along, dropping magnets on one and using shims and clips for the others.
Once everything was opened up she had to jump several leads across the circuit board in a specific order, pattern, and approximate timing. Doing so correctly cut power to the interface board she needed to swap out, and she carefully removed it and set it aside. Unlike the first casino, this interface board had an obvious burn through it from where things had failed. The replacement board slotted in easily enough, and then she had to disconnect the various jump points in a different order before hitting the internal reset button. Five minutes later she was able to use the key still strapped to her arm to disarm the system 'normally', and then issued a shutdown command to make it possible for Dragon to work on replacing other components.
"So why were you doing the work instead of Dragon?" the casino's security chief asked while Dragon worked on replacing other components.
"The key only works for doing that if you make skin contact and are working with bare hands," Taylor explained, holding up and wiggling her bare fingers. "Which is a little hard to do with full-coverage power armor. I couldn't even wear my force field belt or the system wouldn't have recognized the override key."
The man blinked, then pulled a small book out of his back pocket and flipped through it. "Huh, the manual does say something about that. And to properly wash your hands after eating anything greasy if you're going to try it."
She shrugged at that one while working to get her belt back on. With any luck she wouldn't need to take it off for any of the other casinos, as this one was the one with the longest time since maintenance had last been done. "Going into the internals with anything but clean hands seems a bit risky to me."
"Right, right. How did you get volunteered into being her assistant today?"
"Miss Hebert is a significant shareholder," Dragon replied as she came back to the crates of spare components. "Getting experience with the 'drudgework' that the company has to deal with helps her better understand the company in general so that she can better exercise her votes."
He blinked at that, then nodded. "Right, right. Similar to when one of the bigwigs comes down and does one of the menial jobs for a day, but without the 'see how the rest of the employees treat them' and similar aspects."
"Essentially, yes. Though I'll admit that it's very convenient that she had time to come out and help with these systems. I wasn't expecting to need to use the skin-contact access method today, and I would've had a harder time walking someone else through the steps needed."
"I'm amazed that she didn't need you to walk her through it."
Dragon grinned and tapped Taylor's visor. "Did you know that these function as heads-up displays?"
He turned to stare at Taylor for a moment, then nodded. "Right, that makes a lot of sense too. Bring the instructions up and read them as you work."
That wasn't what Taylor had done, of course, but he didn't need to know that. Instead, she grabbed one of the component boards that her tinker snark had told her could do with repair or replacement and followed Dragon to where it would need to be swapped out.
By the end of the day Taylor had seen the inside of five different casinos and spent a significant amount of time with a biometric security key strapped to her arm. The third casino had been worse off than the second because of multiple attempts to break into the vault since the last maintenance run, and the fifth had been subject to abuse by someone trying to 'fix' it themselves with the manual. The one that specifically warned about doing anything included without direction from someone else telling you that it was needed and should be done. They'd spent the entire afternoon rebuilding that one, and the manager had cringed at the resulting bill.
The fourth had been the only actually trivial stop of the day, and she'd spent longer eating lunch there than doing the actual work they were there to do.
There had also been a number of parahumans following them, something that Dragon was concerned about after Taylor had informed her as the Protectorate and Wards weren't supposed to be following them around. None of the parahumans approached them, nor were they known to Taylor in any way, but having them move outside of each casino that they were working in throughout the day didn't seem like a good thing. Sadly, nobody had picked up on anyone suspicious wandering about, so they weren't sure who any of them were. Or even if they were locals compared to tourists that had recognized Dragon or Taylor and were hoping to get pictures.
Still, Taylor's day had actually gone better than Amy's had, all things considered. Someone had set fire to the movie theater in Brockton Bay while it was essentially full of kids just after lunch, which had resulted in Amy spending a large portion of her afternoon clearing up smoke inhalation issues in said kids. They didn't know who had done the deed, only that they'd targeted the emergency exits and heating system air intakes. Only one person had been seriously injured despite all of that, and it turned out to be Jason ensuring that his sister didn't get hurt.
Being done 'for the day', Taylor had headed off towards the Hero Memorial hotel to get dinner at the sub shop the locals liked near it, then swung by the arcade to see if anyone had beaten her high score on Demon's Gate yet. Only to find that the pinball machine was out of order.
"What happened to Demon's Gate?" she asked at the counter.
"Some nut wailed on it when they lost," the girl behind the counter replied. "It faulted and the tinker who built it isn't available to come out and fix it until next month."
Taylor nodded, since her tinker snark was telling her that one of the bearings had jammed. "I see. What's with the 'reward' sign?"
"Ah, yeah. Two things, the first is a free sundae and three free plays for getting it working again before the tinker comes out, at the tinker's insistence. They don't want to make the trip. The other is for the name of the nut who broke it."
"Oh." Well, she could probably get it working again easily enough. She walked over and looped around it. After three passes her tinker snark was positive that the only major problem was the jammed bearing, though there was a lot of basic wear and tear that could be dealt with as well. But unjamming the bearing was simple enough. Taylor just kicked the machine from the back hard enough to release it, then hit the power switch.
She only realized that she had an audience when people gasped as the machine went through its startup sequence, rotating the tables back and forth a couple of times before settling into 'attract mode'.
The employee that had been at the counter came up to Taylor. "What the hell did you do to get it working again?"
Taylor shrugged. "Percussive maintenance."
"What?"
"I hit it and now it works." The girl just stared. "The tables were obviously too far forward, likely jammed from someone kicking and hitting the front. I kicked the machine in the right spot to pop them loose from the back."
"Oh. That actually makes sense. Still, that means you're owed a sundae and three free plays on the machine."
Taylor shrugged. "I don't think I need any plays, unless I need to defend my high score anyway, but I'll take you up on the sundae."
"Your..." the girl started, then blinked a couple of times. "It's you! Nobody's even gotten close to your score. And not for lack of trying either."
Well, it was nice to know that she was still the reigning champion. Still, Taylor did 'accept' the three free plays, giving them to three kids that were there and could 'properly test' the machine for her.
the most satisfying type of maintenance, especially when you can picture the head of the moron who used force to knock it out of place.
