A story about a trans self-insert with a CYOA-style tinker trump powerset, struggling with the reversal of their transition and the horrific stress resulting from being dumped on a veritable hellworld.
It is NOT just a straight "accumulate all the power and horde it" fic. In fact one of the reasons I made this is because almost all SI fics involve hoarding power, and it bothers my little anarchist heart.
The powerset is as follows:
- The user is connected to a shard, but this shard has what I call "conceptual bullshit" and has various properties (most importantly, negentropy). It also does not have certain Entity-enforced restrictions such as dimension-locks on the technology. Expect me munchkining and manipulating this whole thing to hell and back.
- The user has access to 5 tinker charges that they can put into any specialisation they can think of (each charge is worth 2 tinker points on the PRT power ratings system), that they can reallocate at will at any time.
This story is also a self-insert, and as someone who is trans and has various neurodivergencies, this inherently involves exploring that experience. Furthermore, I will be dumped into the story without access to my current nonbinary transition process, as such it will likely have fair amounts of descriptions of dysphoria and negative mental states.
It will also not pretend to be apolitical. I am an extremely political person - it affects strongly my way of acting IRL and it would be deeply inaccurate (and probably impossible) to even try to cut that out of the story. This story will NOT just be me accumulating more power than everyone (though there will of course be intense power growth, because obviously).
In terms of antiperks, they are kind of implicit to the story but at the very least include:
- Targeting by the gangs in BB
- Specifically, and more emphatically, targeting by the Empire 88 (for obvious reasons)
- Targeting by the S9 (because they aren't allowed to let people make things better)
- Targeting by Cauldron and other major players.
As for comments/suggestions, i would appreciate if people are nonconfrontational about it because i deal poorly with confrontational conversation for personal reasons. Generally just don't be a dick about stuff like changes I make to myself in the story related to my body (a lot of these are actually things I want to do in real life as well and criticising those is unhelpful and insulting).
I do however appreciate constructive criticism, especially w.r.t canon-compliance but not necessarily always adhering to WoG-only canon or any case where there is unspecified things that may have fanon but not canon.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I don't own Worm]
BANG!
I woke to the sound of gunshots in the distance, shivering slightly on hard, rough ground, rocks jabbing my partially exposed back. Yes, I probably should have done something to acknowledge the fucking gunshots, but you know, I had just woken up somewhere that distinctly wasn't my bed, or in fact anywhere near my place as far as I could tell, and I was kind of panicking and terrified, and consequently froze in place in the alley I found myself in, unable to think properly at all, at least for a couple minutes. I only jolted into some semblance of action when I heard more fucking gunshots, louder than they were before, and legged it away from them in a blind panic, running through decrepit alleyways which stank of urban decay and broken spirits.
As the gunshots vanished into the distance behind me, I slowed to a halt and finally took some time to look around and analyse my situation. The first thing I noticed was that my body was wrong, wrong, wrong. I had no breasts, I was sweating way too much, and my skin was rough and uncomfortable and I squirmed. Fuck. Whatever had brought me here had completely erased any of my transition and I was already feeling the mental and physical effects, the distinct dysphorias of various body parts and the effect of testosterone on my brain swirling into the dreaded depths of depressive hopelessness. I wanted to scream, to cry, and curl up on the floor and sleep forever, but my instinctive repressive response to outward emotional reactions was kicking in and thank fuck for that because I heard a racket just around the corner, and just about had time to hide behind a dumpster before I saw several people, in red and black and with Nazi tattoos.
They were facing away for now, but I didn't take the chance and as quietly as possible shuffled further back behind a dumpster, so there was no way for them to see me just by walking down the street. Staring at the dumpster (not like I had much else to look at right at that moment), I noticed a bit of graffiti, two 8's interlocked in black, with a red outline around it.
Well that smells fashy and also I really fucking hate Nazis, I thought to myself. By this point I was having suspicions on what was going on. Red and black clothes colours, Nazi symbols, graffiti'd 88s? That sounded suspiciously like the Empire 88 gang from Worm. In which case, oh shit.
It was then I noticed the 5 charges, ready and waiting in my mind's eye. Just looking at them I could feel the conceptual bullshit involved in them, the most pure concept of "tinker" jammed into malleable things for me to play with, and I was instantly distracted from the Nazis by shiny new bullshit conceptual powers because that's how my brain works with new things. I was going to do so much with this, the munchkin potential of these powers was practically infinite. Despite the depressive state I was in I was nearly overrun with giddy excitement, almost cackling with the sheer potential capabilities for everyone everywhere, running through possibilities of what I could do with these in my head, just for a bit.
While the Nazis walked past the dumpster, I twisted one of the charges into a specialisation I knew I needed to survive, in case my instinctive understanding was wrong and they were locked down. I pulled on the charge with the concept of hormones, and the charge shifted to the side in my mind's eye, with a purple haze covering it, and I felt a rush of blueprints and understanding as to the nature of hormones in life of all forms, some local to earth and some so alien it was impossible to describe. It felt limited, though. Under-powered, barely usable for any complex task without significant effort and with a clear cap on technological capability that I just knew was barely a sliver of the true potential of hormone related technology.
Then I tried the part of the powers that would make me the most bullshit tinker to exist in Worm (if I was in Worm, I still hadn't confirmed that yet), and pulled the concept of hormones out of the purple charge, feeling the understanding of potent technologies slip away, as the charge returned to a plain, glowing white. I peeked out from behind the dumpster, and the Nazis finally walked around the corner at the other end of the alleyway. Testing could come later, I needed information and shelter first. I was hesitant to leave though, the thought of anyone seeing my body like this made me wince, let alone the obvious danger of asking anyone to actually use my pronouns in a city with enough Nazis that being dumped randomly in it had them be the people I first saw. Right now I had no meaningful way to defend myself at all other than legging it as fast as I can, and I'm not particularly physically fit.
It took several minutes, but I managed to convince myself to start walking down the alleyway, in the opposite direction from which the Nazis went to. Presumably they were going somewhere, and places with large collections of Nazis were places I wasn't remotely interested in going to. So, with some trepidation I began looking for some form of location indicator, pacing down more of the decaying alleyways and avoiding the larger streets where I would be seen. Eventually, after more wandering and near-misses with running into Nazis, I found a junction with road signs pointing to various places. Two of them confirmed my worst suspicions - the one pointing forward, to a region with more modern buildings, labelled "Brockton Bay Commercial District", and the one pointing leftward, to "Downtown [PRT Headquarters]".
This meant I was in Worm, or something sufficiently similar that it had Brockton Bay as a city, which meant I had a number of different threats to think about, even though I was barely functional right now, without companions, and harbouring more dangerous information than even Cauldron could manage. What an absolute shitshow, not even starting on the more low-level threats like the Empire and Coil, both of whom would be willing to kill me (or in Coil's case, have me drugged in a cell underground as a just-as-unpleasant alternative). Even thinking about this made me want to scream in frustration, but hey, the first part of solving a problem is recognising there is one right? And having totally bullshit tinker powers at least partially made up for it and provided a potent solution to the issue if I could just get somewhere to bootstrap myself enough for self defense.
Unfortunately, the discreetness I'd managed to maintain so far collapsed, as while I was poking my head out of an alley looking at the road sign and contemplating how deep in shit I currently was, apparently a Wards patrol (of Clockblocker and who I presumed was Gallant) had snuck up behind me rather quietly. Presumably, Gallant had sensed my intense depression, dysphoria, anxiety, isolation, and fear (all of which I was desperately trying to repress to get a handle on my situation and not have a complete breakdown right at the worst possible time). When I heard them, I physically jumped around, let out a small "eep", and nearly ran away but my freeze response apparently won out and I just sort of stared at them, mind racing about what the fuck I was meant to do if they talked to me. Which of course they did because I totally needed attention on me right now. Gallant (or who I presumed was Gallant) was the first to speak.
"Are you OK Mr...."
...and somehow my mood became even worse at the sudden (if expected) misgendering, and I saw Gallant flinch (which provided more evidence of him reading my emotional state and, in fact, being Gallant), and I replied - with the hope that at least the Wards wouldn't be bigoted dicks on this shithole planet - "it's Mx., and I'm Zychi, and I'm not really OK but I doubt there's much anyone can do about it right now heh"
- and Clockblocker's masked eyes raised for a second before seeming to recognise what I meant and gave me a mild nod. Gallant looked like he'd made some kind of revelation (i guessed he perhaps had never seen what colour gender dysphoria corresponded to before or something), then winced at the second thing. I shuffled awkwardly, head jerking around everywhere but where the Wards' eyes were, as my initial freeze response was wearing off. "Well, if you see any Nazis or other cape-led gang fights please give the PRT a call on this number," - Gallant handed me a small card with the PRT and Protectorate numbers on them - "and we should deal with them. We actually came through here because someone called in a fight between Hookwolf and Skidmark earlier. Did you see anything?"
I shook my head and told them I'd only been here a few minutes, but about an hour ago I heard a gunfight. "Well, you do look extremely tense. If something traumatic happened to you you can give us a call, yeah", Clockblocker stated, not unkindly, though I guessed he was offering a hint in case I was a fresh trigger, given Gallant's subvocalisation into the communicator that probably wasn't as discreet as he thought. I guess my mental state was sufficiently fucked up for that to be a logical conclusion, huh.
I mumbled a positive response and the Wards left me to my thoughts again. The sun was apparently beginning to set at this point (I seemed to have woken in the evening), and I knew I needed shelter soon of some kind. Being outside in Brockton Bay at night was not the sort of activity that appealed to me in the slightest.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I don't own Worm]
You'd think that tinkering powers couldn't help with locating shelter, right? You'd be wrong. Tinker powers are good for all kinds of things, more specifically seeing the ways in which technology works and ways to disassemble and analyse it. To aid in my shelter-finding task, I began crafting some relevant specialisations together - two charges into infrastructure and urban tinkering (which let me see the many, many, many flaws in Brockton's building designs and infrastructure technology that went into creating the dank, dark alley I was currently hiding in), one into home construction for purposes of identifying appropriate buildings or other containers to stay in overnight, one into lock tinkering to identify places I could disassemble or break the locks on, and one into furnishing tinkering to help identify places I can make cozy, because fuck if I was going to go without at least a bed of some kind.
I knew I was missing something, and realised I probably should have asked the Wards for a map of Brockton Bay. Because I didn't, I now had to sneak around pretty much blindly (though I did know that there were lots of abandoned places near the docks, so heading towards the sea was probably a good shout) while trying to avoid any kind of gang attention at all. My massive knowledge of city infrastructure helped more directly identify the direction that the sea and more specifically the docks were likely in - along with the ocean smells, of course - which was at least a consolation prize.
And so, the journey began. Honestly, it was rather boring most of the way, though I did see at least one light streaking through the sky, which was probably Purity if I had to take a guess, and I heard a couple explosions in the distance and screaming which unfortunately there was little I could do about right now in a city with capes about. Goddamn Nazis being all Nazi-ish. As twilight approached, I was lucky to finally see the ocean, and the frankly magnificent (if gaudy and out of touch, in my view) Protectorate Rig floating over the bay. My tinker power was tingling at a warehouse across the street out of the alley I was crouching in, showing that unlike several of the surrounding buildings, it was a more reinforced structure, clearly designed to survive low-level cape fights. It also had a lock that I could see exactly how to break, and as such, I decided to cross the road, poking my head out in each direction of the alley, found it clear, and dashed across the road, as close to the ground as possible, and immediately hid again behind a wall next to the abandoned warehouse I was interested in before someone saw me.
That was a good thing too, because next thing I knew, Glory Girl (I could tell by the emotional aura, which was... wow) came barreling out of the sky towards the alley I had just been in. I discovered why, as not a minute later two capes (both wearing E88 colours) and some skinheads came out of the back of the alley I was just in, dragging a black woman by the hair. Just seeing it made me want to fucking throw up, thinking about what they were probably going to do. What made it worse was being completely unable to help, stuck there, having to watch them spew slurs and threaten that woman who was unfortunate enough to get stuck near Empire territory. Judging by the way the two capes looked at each other, and the frequent taps by one on the other, I guessed they were Victor and Othala. That's what they would do to me, to anyone like me, if they had the chance, I thought to myself. I don't think I'd ever hated Nazis so much before as in that moment, which is a fucking impressive feat.
Luckily for the woman, Glory Girl had come across the little Empire "Initiation drive" and was busy smashing the skinheads into the ground, maybe a little violently but frankly I didn't give the slightest fuck about their wellbeing at that point. I was hiding just behind the warehouse I had picked in a combination of terror (from the fucking Nazis), horror, and awe (from Glory Girl's aura, which was beginning to dissipate) - I curled up on the floor silently leaking tears as Collatoral Damage Barbie finished making Nazis into Intentionally Damaged Skinheads, zip-tying them and calling the PRT to take them away. After almost half an agonising hour, she finally left along with the PRT (carrying the unfortunate woman to her apartment), and I got to work on the warehouse after uncurling myself from my little "oh fuck" ball.
Picking the lock was trivial and I opened the door as quietly as possible, ensuring that there was no-one inside. Then, I shut the door behind me, and turned on the lights (apparently this place was just leeching off the grid, which my tinker power seemed to be rather fond of given the random dust coated machinery I could see around here that could be used to manufacture railway infrastructure). Unfortunately for my tinker power, I wouldn't be making any of that tonight, but that was simple enough to resolve - I simply pushed all my charges into home modification and it became trivial for me to manipulate pieces of machinery into turning some of the raw iron on the floor into explicitly structured flexible foam that I used - in combination with spare fabric lying around - to construct a mattress, pillow, and cover. I also get to see what a tinker-fugue felt like, and I have to say, it was pretty trippy, moving completely automatically with no conscious control like that.
It took me barely an hour to construct a lusciously comfortable bed, illustrating the absolute ridiculousness of tinker powers, which I then threw myself onto. It was at this point I finally had some personal space and a comfortable position, and I finally, finally had that breakdown I knew was coming the moment I was out of immediate danger, and I silently cried and almost screamed (though I still had some restraint), hugging the cover trying in futility to overcome the loneliness and abandonment that was invading my thoughts and the all consuming dread and hopelessness that was almost an inevitable infection coming from the state of Earth Bet, the constant unyeilding body discomfort that permeated anywhere the bed touched my skin, the feeling of squirming dysphoria.
I did eventually fall asleep, and I was lucky that I don't tend to remember dreams.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I don't own Worm]
I woke up. I didn't get up, I merely became awake in my bed. I felt like shit, I could feel dry tears on my face from the night before, and I certainly was not in a mental state to actually drag myself out of the bed right now, though the constant reminder of my shitty biology at least counterbalanced the depression in terms of motivation, I guess. Not nearly enough, though. The hormone problem needed to be fixed as soon as possible or there was no way I'd make it more than a few weeks, but I was just so tired I wanted to lay there and not get up, which I did for almost two hours, the whole time just spent feeling empty and miserable and also viscerally uncomfortable. Hell, I could already feel stubble and that just made it even fucking worse.
30 minutes of a grumbling stomach, approaching hunger pangs and 2 hours of nothing to do to satisfy my constantly-in-flux attention was finally enough to push me to actually get up and clothe myself - with great discomfort - and begin thinking about tackling some issues I was having. First (and the easiest to solve with the materials I had) was removing any trace of stubble because, frankly, I really hate body hair on myself but most especially facial hair. As such, I thought about what I could do about it, and came to the conclusion that dealing with that problem permanently rather than just getting a shaver was the best option, since I was a tinker and damn if I was going to let the current inaccessibility of technology to the general population stop me.
Hence why, two hours later, I was in the middle of building a machine out of the remaining scrap parts in the factory - several lasers and electrodes were constructed along with me co-opting some CNC control chips and reprogramming them with body hair detection - using an Aesthetic Body Modification specialisation of strength Tinker 10 (a completely ridiculous and overspecced power for the job). Even in a tinker fugue, I recognised how much I hated writing anything in the C programming language and swore to bring Rust and several others into this reality as soon as possible. I also had to type it in on a keyboard with no display at all, which was much slower than using a display (and only possible because of the use of a tinker power in the first place), so another goal would be to obtain a laptop and internet access too.
Another hour of ridiculously overpowered tinker-fugueing later and I had a complete body hair removal machine ready to go. Before I gave in to the depressive urge to curl back into bed and sleep some more, I stepped in the machine I completed, turned it on, and promptly passed out from pain because I was so focussed on getting rid of the body hair I forgot to get a specialty that would create something to dull the pain from having lasers fry every single hair follicle other than those on your head in a matter of minutes. Luckily I didn't scream and attract attention, I just immediately passed out, and was woken up later by intense hunger pangs - far more than what originally got me out of bed - and a throbbing pain across my entire body. My skin was red all over and I bit down a scream and just about avoided passing out again a second time. Impulsive decisions sometimes really suck, but at least it was on something as relatively harmless as this, I suppose, even if it hurt so fucking much. I still had unpleasant skin, but at least it had no hair at all now, which more than made up for the temporary pain, even if I probably couldn't touch it for another several hours without almost screaming again.
I began thinking about how to manage my hormone levels, and threw in a 3 charge hormone tinker specialisation to attempt to solve the problem (while waiting for the skin pain to subside, because doing nothing did not appeal to me at the minute) - I pushed on the tinker power and was provided numerous solutions. Most of them, however, required a major source of biomass to get certain proteins to work from and manufacture hormones and hormone blockers. Wracking my brain for alternative solutions (which was difficult when so much of my attention was forced on the pain I was still in), I eventually remembered a hormone that converted testosterone into estrogen, and poked my tinker power for artificial equivalents to the process, which it gladly provided. Right now though, I had insufficient tools to manufacture the highly structured metal required to actually cause an equivalent process to occur, and there was the safety issue of leaking pure heavy metals directly into my bloodstream.
Solving the first issue was completely doable by just adding another two charges of Tinker Bullshit to my hormone specialisation, but the latter was not something that came under it's purview. So, while still in pain, I entered a fugue and began using literal wrenches, hammers and primitive CNC machines to construct a nanostructured metallic enzyme equivalent. Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps) my fugue was rudely interrupted by the sound of fighting, and metal-on-metal outside - far too close to comfort, sending my anxiety skyrocketing.
I quickly shut down the CNC machines - I'd rather not risk someone hearing them - and peeked outside through the keyhole in the door, catching glimpses of Hookwolf absolutely trashing the buildings on the other side of the street as 3 massive, terrifying beasts chased after the Nazi. Because it was just my luck to - apparently - have housed my sort-of-base-lair-accommodation-building right outside a fucking dogfighting ring that was distant enough from me I didn't hear any dogs while walking past here last night. This was really, really bad. If the Empire found me, I'd be so fucked. I was looking at forced recruitment at best, being just killed at worst, although I'm not even sure if the first was better than the second given there was zero way Nazis would allow me to access hormones and related technology, and would most certainly use my technology to murder and harass minorities even more than they already did.
That meant I had to be quiet as fuck and desperately hope Hookwolf didn't notice the squishy tinker in their less squishy but still squishy base, because I really doubted he'd have any trouble getting in it at the moment. First thing I'd do after this was build a goddamn escape hatch at the back if I even survived more than an hour into the future. Then of course if Bitch found me instead, I'd have less immediate problems but I'd be on Coil's radar which was arguably worse - though I might well be on his radar already because of his timeline power. I, while having probably the fifth fight/flight/freeze response within 24 hours, did wonder if conceptual bullshit would fry his precog (at least when changing tinker specialisations), but I had too much of an immediate problem to worry about to deal with that right this second. I was silently cheering for Bitch though - dogfighting is something I hated and I was hoping she trounced Hookwolf at least a bit, even if my main priority was essentially not being found, or shredded by metal blades.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I don't own Worm]
My thoughts were racing as I continued to watch the fight rage outside. Bitch was slamming and mauling Hookwolf repeatedly with her empowered dogs, and Hookwolf kept trying to dodge away from them and towards the dog that Bitch was riding. They essentially seemed to be running around the block opposite me, and I wouldn't be surprised if the PRT and Protectorate were on their way by now. If the Wards came here it'd be much worse because Gallant and Vista could probably detect my presence, but I thought that unlikely given the violence of the fight. I was in high-stress thought mode, and I dumped all my specialisations in stealth technology.
The key aspect was to avoid hiding in a way that made it obvious I was trying to hide, and was also extremely quick to implement. Right now, the biggest risk of discovery was from noise, so I pushed my tinker power for noise reduction technology. The solution came quickly to me - I could use a similar technique to that which allowed me to make my bed to make noise cancelling blocks of foam out of the still remaining chunks of metal, which thankfully I could do extremely quietly and rapidly, given that I already knew how to make it with even more rudimentary tools than I had at the moment (from fugueing to make the hair-removal machine). My hands twitched rapidly with the tools I had and some remaining metal - there wasn't that much left now but foam was extremely low density - and went to work, nerves high. Within barely a minute or two (thank you, Tinker 10 rating, you are serious and total bullshit) I was carefully placing potent sound cancellation foam all across the walls of my surprisingly cozy tinker lair that I really hoped would not get pulped along with me inside it. Of course, I was not going to be reckless with noise - I guessed that Bitch's dogs might have various enhanced senses and I didn't want to tip them off.
I went back to anxiously watching the fight outside, which Bitch was clearly winning by this point. Two of her dogs had managed to pin Hookwolf to the ground and his blades were being smashed apart faster than they regenerated, and he simply couldn't get up at all. Eventually he fled much further down the street the moment Bitch realised he would do so if released, and she walked over to the building I guessed was the dogfighting ring she was after. About 20 minutes of anxious waiting later, and Bitch was carefully moving bedraggled, terrified dogs into a van she'd apparently driven up to a couple minutes walk down the road. She loaded all the dogs in the van, and I seemed to be in the clear, but as she was moving the last dogs to her transport, one of her main three (the one missing the eye, which if I recalled correctly, was Angelica) walked over to the door of my little warehouse and whined at it while I desperately tried to make shooing motions with my hands at her through the keyhole (which obviously didn't work, I was just panicking). For a second I thought Bitch wouldn't notice, but she's a pretty attentive person when it comes to dogs and came over to my tinker hideyhole to see what was up, and looked kinda pissed that her dog was upset.
Sweating profusely and uncomfortably from anxiety, I ran over to the bed and hid under the cover, which obviously wouldn't work but it's kind of my natural response to personal space being violated so I did it anyway, Bitch barged the door open and stomped over to me while my eyes went everywhere in the room except at her and I froze (again!) from fear. Of course, I knew logically that she probably wouldn't actually physically hurt me, but that does not change my instinctive reaction to people acting in a domineering manner around me in my personal space and so, with Bitch hovering over me aggressively and me in a state of unmitigated terror, she almost growled at me the question "Did you hurt the dogs?", to which I managed to squeak out, just barely, a "No" in response.
She didn't stop frowning, but she did frown less with a muttered "Good", which I considered a reasonable start, somewhere between the other thoughts that were just internal screaming. She didn't move to leave though, and started moving around the place, and I was too afraid to ask her to stop while she explored my home. She moved to touch one of the bits of metallic enzyme emulation, but I managed to squeak out a "don't, that's not safe" before she gave herself blood contamination or something like that. That stuff was seriously dangerous without appropriate tools to contain and manipulate it. That did remind me, I needed a way to safely use it in my body which required at least two things - sterile tools and a blood vessel integration component that would let testosterone through to be processed but not allow any metallic compounds to leak into the bloodstream.
Before I could dive too far into thinking about technology though, Bitch moved to leave. I decided (somewhat impulsively) to give her some information on Coil's power because honestly she and the Undersiders (most especially Tattletale, in my view, given the nature of her recruitment) deserved to know and frankly I like talking about information I have to other people. So I told Bitch, quietly and without looking even near her, "Coil has a power in which he has two timelines and drops one at will, and you should probably tell Tattletale that if you meet her or whatever, cus it's useful".
Her only response was "What do you want?" and a deepening frown because I'd apparently forgotten about her feeling like stuff comes with obligation. The answer of course, being "I like sharing information, probably way too much for my own good sometimes", which simply got a grumbled "too much like Tattletale" and her finally leaving my hideyhole with her three main dogs and driving off her van - presumably to a shelter. I slumped and my heart stopped racing quite so fast, sighing in some amount of relief.
Not that I was out of danger - far from it - but the immediate threat was passed. And so, the depression sank in again, and it took all my willpower not to just flop on the bed and mindlessly run through the tinker blueprints in my head while feeling like shit. But I could now tinker again in peace, and I pushed through and completed the metallic, structural enzyme emulation material, which took another three hours in fugue - this was highly complex structured nanomaterial being created with literal fucking wrenches, after all, and there's only so much even a Tinker 10 power can do to enable that ridiculous level of disparity in scale and precision. Carefully coming out of fugue with a container with an indented biohazard warning symbol in one hand and a wrench in another, I then moved onto the next problem with a specialisation of "biochemical filtration", which apparently let me use even more structured metal to prevent the traversal of any enzyme-replicating metallic structures but allowed standard carbon-based molecules through. Another hour in my tinker fugue and I had a tube with the ends enclosed - about the size of the main artery in my right arm - containing a powder of metal-emulated aromatase (the hormone converting testosterone into estrogen).
One more shift into even a low-level Biointegration specialisation and I had my hormone conversion module - I still needed sterilisation though, and for that I converted some of the lasers in the hair removal machine to UV light and was finally, finally ready - with a sterilised scalpel and highly improvised metal-derived bandages and stitches (a simple technology from the biointegration specialisation, apparently). I went into fugue to perform the surgery, and this time I actually screamed in pain for several minutes (a worrying thing but the sound damping I'd placed around earlier should have prevented anyone more than a few metres away from hearing), eventually dropping out of fugue with a metal bandage wrapped tight around my right arm. As darkness approached and I grew tired, I felt satisfied even if the thing I was satisfied about was successfully completing sketchy, back-alley tinkertech surgery on myself.
I curled up on the bed and despite being exhausted and hungry, despite being alone on a completely different (and distinctly more depressing) world, despite the impending apocalypse and constant threat of enslavement and murder as a independent queer tinker, I managed to fall asleep with the first smile on my face since getting here.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I woke up and got out of bed, actually happy and already feeling much less depressed than yesterday - a good indication that my hormone processing implant was working - along with feeling much less squirmy and more distinct, localised dysphoria as compared to the general sense of absolute misery that I was feeling yesterday. This was a massive improvement and meant I was in a much better state to improve my tinkertech and think about a bit of long term planning (just a bit - I'm terrible at following any kind of plan). Brain fog was a problem however, probably due to my lack of food, and I could do with a shower. and internet access and other information.
The problem was, I now lacked resources, and the usual regions with resources were a massive beacon to anyone looking for new tinkers - the scrapyard and boat graveyard were both out. Of course, the Protectorate was theoretically an option, but in practise they upheld the status quo (and state power that was sort of merged into weird PRT paramilitary-esque structure, extremely undemocratic), and had a hierarchical command structure (and I presumed fixed hours), and were ultimately under the control of Cauldron, all of which made them a complete non-starter. Joining a villain team or independent hero team (or at least New Wave) was also a non-starter. Villain teams because they often did questionable-at-best things even if I don't care (ethically speaking) about the concept of legality at all, independent hero teams because they were ineffectual and didn't really solve the root causes of problems and just punch anyone who breaks the law. Essentially superpowered cops - like the Protectorate - which is rather depressing. What I wanted was to give humanity the collective power to punch a shitty omnicidal demigod in the fucking face and expand into the stars (and other dimensions) and make society more free. Amongst numerous other things, at least once my immediate survival and reasonable happiness was assured.
A big issue I knew I was going to have was the inherent power disparity due to my meta-knowledge of Worm (more of which I needed to check, but I really expected I was at some point in the canon timeline), much amplified with the capes of Brockton Bay and events here, which meant forming social relationships would be pretty difficult - the only information-gathering thinker in Brockton who could even approach equal informational power without me having to say anything (a dangerous prospect with Cauldron around) or verify it was Tattletale, and she was a teenager (and talking to her would imply Coil obtaining anything I know too, of course). Isolation was not healthy for me to go through for extended periods of time, so I needed to come up with a solution, which would probably involve the internet, or high speed travel.
I wanted to inform Case 53s of their true origins as well (specifically in this case, those with Faultline's Crew, as they were the most accessible for me to speak to one on one), but that required some pretty powerful precog and Clairvoyant-blocking technology to avoid Miss "PtV-shard-wearing-a-fedora" shanking me in my sleep - technology that was a couple orders of magnitude out of my ability to produce at the moment. I also needed to be wary of my own power drain - at the moment any electricity I was using was coming straight from the grid, and anything more than those hair removal lasers would probably trip tinker monitoring systems. Long term, I was looking for self-defence against any Trump powers (I was quite attached to my lovely interdimensional eldritch abomination and didn't want anything to happen to it if my instincts about what it had available matched up to reality - as it had so far with the behaviour of my tinker charges). Importantly I didn't want the larger shard network discovering the negentropy, or I'd have thinkers and tinkers drooling in front of me as their shards decided to hijack their body to look at juicy [DATA]. Hell, maybe Zion would decide to bring out his fuck-you beam and kill me before I could kill his arsehole self, just to steal my shard.
While following plans was hard, having a list of some tasks to do helped at least a little bit. Though all this thinking had distracted me - once again - from finding an actual source of food. Going outside was going to be difficult - even in my much more peaceful original Earth, I struggled with anxiety outside without people with me, and Brockton Bay was a significantly more shithole-ish place than where I lived before, which made it much worse. I also lacked any actual money (or a way to get it) other than beating up gangsters which I wasn't really strong enough to do.
And then the revelation hit me. I didn't need to be that strong, just enough to take a single gangster, which didn't even require a powered suit or anything - just a few bits of metal in the right places, perhaps spikes, and I'd outclass a sufficiently low-level gang member even as my gangly and slightly overweight (and very dysphoric still) self. Spike-studs on the end of my shoes, a few bits between my fingers, and I'd be set if I punched them in a vulnerable area. Hell, I only needed one gangster with money on them! And there were lots of Nazis ready to take money from too, with pretty much no ethical qualms at all, even if doing so in practise would probably need me to psych myself up significantly.
As such, I switched my tinkering specialty to hand-to-hand combat and fugued with the few remaining smaller CNC machines to produce knuckle-spikes and ejectable toe spikes for my shoes, installing the latter during the fugue, which I came out of about 30 minutes after beginning. Equipping both sets of equipment, I stalked out of my door (closing it gently behind me) and began engaging in Nazi hunting. Hiding from both E88 patrols around the area and the groups of civilian people who were out in the middle of the day (all white, gender conforming, and heteronormative in general, what a coincidence!), I headed towards where the Medhall building tore into the Brockton Bay skyline. The logic here was that further towards the core of Empire 88 power, the patrols would likely involve less gangsters, and I could probably take a single gangster out before there was a chance for a cape to get involved. Other than for resources, right now I really did not want to involve myself with any street level fighting if I could avoid it. I wasn't used to physically hurting people (even if I was willing to do so, as was generally the case with Nazis), so this would be hard. Hell, I could barely manage confrontation of any kind without freezing up, which meant that I had to take out a Nazi fast, before they could strike back and call for help or I got so anxious I couldn't keep going.
So it was with great trepidation, then, that I found my first isolated Empire gangster about halfway between my hidey-hole and the Medhall building. I snuck behind him as quietly as possible, psyched myself up for several seconds, then jammed my left arm around his stomach and slammed my right fist into the side of his neck. Twisting in front of him, I kneed him in the crotch and he keeled over, clearly completely out of it within about 3 seconds of the final smackdown. Baseline human versus baseline human fights with lack of significant training did tend towards quick, one-sided knockouts, though it was a goddamn shock to experience that I had just physically smacked down a fucking Nazi in all of about 20 seconds flat.
Well, there was no point waiting around. I opened his wallet and grabbed the $43 he was apparently carrying on him, then bolted as fast as fucking possible before anyone could see me, jamming the spiked knuckles into my trouser pockets so they weren't visible. The moment I got back to my personal warehouse, coming down from adrenaline, my body violently shook and I felt sick probably from hunger and physical exertion as well as the first serious physical fight in my life. I just lied on my bed for about ten minutes, calming myself down from the whole ordeal, then I removed the toe spikes from my shoes and put them back on. Opening the door, I stepped outside - uncomfortable in my still-unwashed clothes and anxious around the small groups of chattering people walking down the street in front of me, not paying me attention in the slightest. I needed food first, to think clearly, so I began the trek towards the richer part of the city, towards the boardwalk. Maybe I'd get to try the mythical Fugly Bob's, but for now I wanted something quick to recover from the issues that going 3 days without food would likely cause when eating too much at once. As I moved towards the boardwalk, I came across just the place - a cozy corner shop that sold those nice cheap take-away sandwiches, pasties, and sausage roles of all flavours.
I would have picked tuna and sweetcorn, but it was much more expensive than on my home world - a subtle but sobering reminder of the effect of the horrors known as Endbringers. Hope-killing monsters that were suffocating humanity in the cradle on Earth Bet. I idly wondered whether the Endbringers here could be converted to Friendbringers, but that was a long-off question to answer and I'd probably have the means and need to kill them before I got much of a chance. Regardless, I picked up a beef and onion and an egg and cress sandwich for about $3 total, then ravenously consumed them in probably as many seconds.
Still hungry, I walked down the boardwalk, almost bouncing in joy at finally eating, and I saw a blonde with freckles and green eyes in a coffee shop - probably Tattletale, given the way she gaped at me and looked like she was about to run after me - but I started jogging before she got any chances to catch me. I really didn't feel like dealing with someone as adept at social-fu as Tattletale was right now, I was already mentally tired enough from the whole Empire goon thing and worrying about all the other shit I'd dealt with over the past couple of days. She seemed to get it after a minute or so, though, and chose not to pursue me as I slowed down and walked to a more expensive takeout with greasier and more filling food (still not Fugly Bob's, but frankly I was still too hungry to wait any longer). I ordered the most meaty, cheese-rich burger I could see on the menu at a reasonable price (about $6) and absolutely devoured the thing. It was fucking amazing, after 3 days of no food - and I ended up ordering another one to take home with me.
While I was sufficiently close to the trainyard (I could just about see it from the end of the boardwalk) I decided to go investigate and pick up some plants that were probably laying around, since I fully intended on biotinkering (I actively relished the idea of messing with biology, contrary to the admittedly understandable prejudice this world has against it even if it allows for unparalleled morphological autonomy and solutions to tons of problems, with it's self-repairing nature meaning it pretty much never needs maintenance - Piggot would hate me the moment any of my stuff became public, though). An uneventful trip later, and I was walking back down the boardwalk - this time Tattletale looked at me, glanced at the plants, paled, and whispered intensely into the ear of the boy who'd appeared next to her (who was clearly Alec). She recognised at the very least that my power involved tinkering and biomass, and, well, yeah, this world was home to the likes of Bonesaw and Nilbog.
I ran back to my little warehouse, exhausted but happy I'd managed to grab food. The sun was just shifting over the middle of the sky and I definitely needed rest, so I decided on a nap for a couple hours. Then I was thinking I'd go on my next important objective - information.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Well, turns out that trying to schedule my sleep was just as ineffective here as it was back in my original world, because I woke up and it was completely dark outside - not the expected result of a two hour nap. I wriggled in my covers, still feeling the dysphoria that came with a complete erasure of two and a half years of hormone replacement therapy progress, and jerked myself out of bed.
I guess I wasn't going to get information today at all, and my mind immediately began running around about five other ideas for what to do. I still had that burger that I could easily reheat from earlier, which I did. It wasn't quite so delicious this time though, but still worth it. I now had 4 ideas on what to do and essentially spent an hour thinking about how much I needed to do each of them, until I eventually decided on resource extraction from the ground. It would spike the power grid - a risk I was aware of but in this case willing to take as compared to the issue where I could be seen pulling from other buildings or scrapheaps. It may set off some tinker alarms in the Protectorate but I was in an abandoned-enough area that I doubted the more local sensors were that well-maintained.
I shifted my specialty into disassembly and fugued into tearing apart all my tinkertech and all the other machines here except the implant and the foam walls and bed, and I was left with neat chunks of metal, CNC processors, glass, and lenses for reassembly into something I could use to truly bootstrap myself. I pushed my tinker power to maximum in the concept of resource gathering and then pushed for ways to pull arbitrary contents from the ground. While anything related to element transmutation via fusion or fission was still well beyond my capabilities, extracting pure elements like silicon and calcium from the ground (with a fairly large power drain however) was within my means. Conveniently, this provided a good avenue for expanding the area I had to work with by generating a fuck-off massive hole in the ground that could work either as an escape tunnel or as an access point to an underground base (ha! take that Coil, I'mma steal your shtick!).
Using a couple of CNC processors and some of the lasers, I designed a machine to produce drill bits, and converted significant amounts of metal into a thick, coiled wire that I'd need to stab directly into the grid. There was no way plugs could cope with the power drain from the drill and elemental separator, and sadly I really did not have the resources for generators of my own - even with a power generation specialty (in fact for that I really needed elementally pure carbon, that was my main bottleneck at the moment). As such, I went to work in a partial tinker fugue, magnetising metal for the drill and shaping drill bits to extreme precision, enough that they would wear down such that they didn't become non-functional until there was almost nothing left of them.
The elemental separator was a potent piece of tinkertech. While the design was more efficient with carbon, I could pull together something that did the same job for a higher energy cost, using iron and lasers to induce bond-separation in common rocks and ground materials like dirt. Several hours later - as the sun was rising - and I'd successfully assembled the entire digging and extraction system using barely more than used scrap. Now of course I had to use it without wrecking various bits of underground infrastructure like electricity lines or water or gas lines.
Repurposing a few lasers and more processors, as well as a magnet to produce a speaker, I constructed a simple sonar which would detect changes in material underground. I had almost nothing left in my piles, but that was fine, because now I could consume the ground for resources! And so, with care, I jacked my drills and elemental extractor into the powergrid, aimed at a 45 degree angle that would just barely miss various lines (most importantly the bundle of fibre that I was planning to hijack for Internet access), and pulled down the lever with a resounding thunk to turn it on. With a raging hum that was music to my ears, the drills sank their teeth into the ground, ripping a hole in the floor - the silicon pile (and some carbon from the dirt that was apparently under the floor) were climbing rapidly, and I was left to my own devices for a while, though it was already almost midday before significant progress had truly been made.
Once again I was reminded how alone I was in this world and I kind of deflated, but it did get me to thinking about the problem. At the very least, I could probably talk to people on the internet and consider people to approach for friendship. I pretty much curled up on the bed and waited, somewhat sourly, for the drill to reach the fibre.
And then I pushed my specialisation towards communication infrastructure at tinker 10 level, which apparently let me straight up just make fibre from the glass I had left over from the lasers in about 5 minutes flat, though it was less flexible than proper fibre cable. I had to use the same manufacturing machine I used for drill bits and reprogram it to produce the interface between the existing fibre cable and my own shoddy replication of one. I also needed to obtain a router that could actually tap fibre, which ironically would probably be the hardest bit without some more money, though I could always steal Medhall's, I thought with a shrug. My base was getting pretty comfy, but it was still extremely barebones and didn't really match how I liked my living spaces to be - it was way too wide open rather than my preferred "small and highly connected rooms".
Ultimately, my problem right now was that I needed more money, to pull resources from shops - like a laptop (even if I could steal Medhall's router, which might be more difficult than I initially thought as much as depriving Nazis of internet access amused me, I'd still need a clean computer to put Linux on to or something - I idly wondered if Earth Bet had used laptops on the market, but then I recalled that computing technology here was about several years behind and even older laptops were probably too slow for my purposes) - that I couldn't make myself. My only reliable method of getting money that didn't involve outing myself - because I was too much of dysfunctional mess to get a normal job and I didn't exactly have ID anyway - came from, essentially, beating up Nazis. Or, come to think of it, I now had internet access - I could hack the Gesselschaft or something, but that would require me to have a definitively traceable bank account (or use the Numberman, but that was a way to get straight on Cauldron's radar). And then another thought came to me - why just steal cash when I can probably extract the pins from debit cards of gangsters and take way more money from them?
It was with that thought that I snuck out of my door - carefully watching for any sign of discovery and luckily finding none so far - and headed further in to Empire territory again, with my spiked knuckles and retractable toe spikes equipped. It was approaching evening, but it was still light, which meant I needed to stick to alleys.
Scanning around myself with my eyes, dashing from behind dumpsters when anyone in front of me was turned away, frequently checking behind me, I rapidly approached the richer areas of downtown, closer to the commercial district and Medhall, until I came down a particularly well-maintained side-street and my heart raced as I hid behind a dumpster and saw Kaiser himself in costume patrolling past me down the street. While I'd love to punch his smug Nazi face I was nowhere near in a position to do so and had to endure a tense wait for him to go around the corner at the end of the street. I waited a few more minutes - much of it just trying to calm myself down a little - before moving on to find another singular E88 gangster in an alley with no-one to see. I took him out as easily as the one a couple days ago, grabbed his card and legged it once again, as the sun began to set - allowing me more free movements while remaining stealthy.
Back at my home base, my drill had apparently been hard at work, with an almost 30 metre deep circular tunnel underground and correspondingly massive piles of silicon and calcium (and a little carbon). Behind the warehouse I had co-opted, the plants I grabbed earlier hadn't died, and would provide a good genetic baseline for some of the things I planned on bioengineering in the future. I pulled the CNC chip out of the drill manufacturing machine (I had really got significant usage out of these chips since I got here), pushed my specialties for 3 charges into Hardware Security and 2 into Scrapyard Manufacturing which let me rewrite the CNC chip to exploit identifiable flaws in the card chip hardware when provided an appropriate interface - which was easy to make with jury-rigging effectively as a specialty.
As such, I now had the pin of this card and was thoroughly prepared to go grab cash out of a machine, except for the complete lack of sunlight. I decided to try and sleep, but I rolled and rolled and could not manage, probably because of when I got up beforehand. My mind instead drifted into ideas for new, more powerful technology and things I should deal with. First thing - I needed to figure out the date, because I still didn't know other than being aware that it was at least post-Undersider formation since Bitch had recognised Tattletale's name. Once I had a laptop I was going to be doing significant amounts of research to check information unavailable (or more likely, that I just didn't remember) from Worm canon, and using it to store tinkertech blueprints. I did remember that I should probably warn Mouse Protector about the Slaughterhouse 9, and as I thought about that I realised I should probably tell people about the Siberian's gimmick as well. Time passed fast, thinking about all kinds of other things I wanted to do, and I did eventually fall asleep, dreaming of bioengineering and logistics.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Armsmaster Interlude - Protectorate HQ
Armsmaster looked up from the work he was doing on his Halberd design - he had just started development on a tranquilizer intended to bring down Lung - as a ping sounded from the screen he primarily reserved for Dragon's avatar when she wanted to talk and collaborate with him. This time, however, it was an urgent videocall from Director Piggot that brought in both the Protectorate and the Wards. Of course, Armsmaster promptly accepted.
"Armsmaster.", the Director greeted, her mouth in a grim line. Armsmaster professionally replied "Yes, Director?"
"While we wait for the rest of those invited to get here, I would like you to run a sweep on sensors for any anomalies, anything that might indicate a new tinker or biotinker setting up operations."
"I will contact Dragon immediately. Is this by any chance related-".
Director Piggot cut him off. "We should wait to discuss that report of a potential new trigger once the others get here."
"Of course.", Armsmaster replied.
2 minutes later, a series of pings indicated that all of the Wards and Protectorate had joined the call. Armsmaster was pulling up a map of Brockton Bay sensor data, and Dragon was rapidly analysing permits, expected power throughput, missing pets or people reports, seismic readings - partially co-opted from the in-progress Endbringer prediction software she and Armsmaster were developing - as well as various other anomalies on the Internet, unusual purchases that she could trace to locations in Brockton Bay or nearby. As the Director indicated the start of the meeting, Dragon had filled up from the bottom of the screen a series of anomaly locations, about 1/6th of the way up.
"Today, I received a concerning call on my personal phone from a villain named Tattletale, a member of the Undersiders. Normally this would be dismissed, but the subject of that call was sufficiently anomalous to require an urgent meeting if even half of what she thinks is accurate. The Think Tank, when given the audio recording, deduced that Tattletale at least believed what she told us to be true, even though Tattletale herself admits she is not perfect.", Director Piggot began. "We may have a rogue biotinker on our hands. Or something sufficiently like it to present an equivalent threat."
Battery grimaced, and Assault quickly snapped from his normally playful composure.
"Perhaps I should run the call over my prototype lie detector", Armsmaster suggested curtly, "It may provide useful information on Tattletale's emotional state, even over a phone call."
"Now probably isn't the time, Armsmaster, though I would suggest taking a look later - it may give us more information on what she believed to be her most important deduction. Moving on, we should go over exactly what Tattletale told me.", Piggot replied. She continued. "Tattletale claimed to have seen the potential biotinker for the first time as they were walking up the boardwalk in fairly unclean clothes - she said that they had given another of her teammates information about the power of a personal enemy, and that they seemed deeply uncomfortable in their body, due to its masculine state. However they seemed to be happy, subconsciously touching skin that was clearly smoother than she expected from a body primarily run on testosterone".
With a slight air of grim amusement, Piggot continued, "Tattletale also said, and I quote 'my power went completely nuts' while looking at them, explaining that this was why she had so much information."
She grimaced, getting to the worst part of the reported events. "30 minutes later she saw the biotinker come back down the boardwalk with a bundle of plants and a burger, and this was when she deduced both that the person in question was almost certainly a biotinker, and their obvious intent to create something exponential. She claimed they seemed 'absolutely enamored' with the concept for some ideological reason."
All the capes, even Clockblocker, frowned at the last sentence.
"Do we have a psychological profile?" Armsmaster asked.
"The currently favoured suggestion by the thinkers is a recently triggered transgender person - probably lacking access to the related transition care - placed in a vulnerable position by a parahuman using a power they did not understand", Piggot continued, "it would fit with the tinker and trump powers we know of and the data we have - recent access to hormone replacement therapy of some kind, an innate understanding of parahuman powers - the result of which was passed to Hellhound in a chance interaction, and obtaining biomass in the form of plants. We also know that thinker powers slide off them in some cases and absolutely latch on to them in others, which perhaps indicates a secondary Trump aspect to their powers," Piggot said with a touch of finality. "Precognition seems to shift around them."
"Perhaps a new thinker blind spot?", Miss Militia suggested with a contemplative frown, "if so, we are in even deeper trouble than initially thought," Piggot replied, "I'll note it as a high priority issue in their file."
"Perhaps we should move on to the discussion of the incident report by Gallant and Clockblocker, and it's relevance?", Armsmaster continued professionally. "That is what I intended to do, Armsmaster. Gallant, please give your personal account of the events," Piggot prompted, the air of concern lifting slightly.
"Of course, Director. Myself and Clockblocker were doing an after-call patrol - in response to a reported gunfight led by Hookwolf and Skidmark near the transition between the commercial district and the Docks. There was very low civilian presence, but I sensed someone in an extreme state of anxiety and general distress, and intense depression - and what I soon learned was gender dysphoria, when I incorrectly gendered them male and recognised a very specific emotion change as they corrected me", Gallant noted in his usual earnest demeanor, "in terms of behaviour, they were extremely tense and actively afraid of us, or perhaps of the social interaction, which would match with a fear of parahumans related to a Trump trigger, or it could be a fear of heroes, the government - or just other people. With the additional information discussed so far, I think it is likely that it's the first, Director. Myself and Clockblocker approached them on the basis of concern and that they seemed in a mental state typical for a new trigger, " Gallant finished politely.
"Thank you, Gallant. I'd like to ask Clockblocker about their own thoughts on the person we are discussing and their interaction, " the Director replied, looking to continue and glancing at the aforementioned Clockblocker.
"Well, Director Piggot, while we were talking - it was a short conversation - they seemed practically frozen to the spot and simultaneously looked like they wanted to flee. When they noticed us, they literally jumped and 'eep'ed, they were that high-strung. I offered them a subtle hint to call us if they had gone through a traumatic event, which they acknowledged. They seemed more interested in getting out of the conversation though, and given that we were on the edge of Empire territory, them being transgender might explain that reaction - they told us that their name was Zychi, zed-wy-see-haitch-eye, but of course in the likely case they are indeed transgender that may not match their legal ID, " Clockblocker stated, his more casual demeanor coming through even in the serious tone the meeting had taken.
"Thank you, Clockblocker. That last part is an important note - IDs may not match the names people use when identifying themselves, especially in cases like this, but I will note it down in the preliminary file on our biotinker as a potential civilian identity, given that they seem intent on becoming an S-class threat at some point, " Piggot concluded. "I will be informing the rest of the PRT to be prepared to initiate containment procedures around Brockton Bay at a few minutes notice. Unfortunately we can't risk startling the biotinker - assigned codename Appleseed - in case it makes them do something more rash. It may yet be possible to bring them under the Protectorate's umbrella and I would rather have a biotinker under PRT command than Brockton Bay turned into another S-class quarantine zone", she gestured to Dragon, "I assume the Guild will be making preparations as well?"
"Absolutely", Dragon replied with her synthetic voice, "I've already contacted the wider Guild and we have notified our primary responders of a potential future S-class threat in Brockton Bay. I'm going to pass over the conversation to Armsmaster, as I finished collating anomalies that may indicate a new tinker or biotinker in the area."
Armsmaster continued "Thank you Dragon. If I may, Director?"
"Of course," she replied, "I am interested to see where our biotinker - codename Appleseed - might be hiding. Filter the data to new anomalies 4 days before the interaction with the Wards."
Armsmaster tapped on his keyboard, and several of the red regions on the map disappeared, leaving 5 - two in the Docks, one in the Trainyard, and two more on opposite ends of the commercial district, and started "While these are all anomalies indicative of some kind of tinker, none of them have yet gained the expected signature of a biotinker. No extra missing pet reports, nothing about large quantities of biomass being shipped to Brockton Bay. Perhaps, given their initial interest in plants, they have no need to obtain biomass from elsewhere," Armsmaster suggested. "This may also indicate another aspect to their specialisation or powers, one which means they see no need to obtain large amounts of biomass from elsewhere. Perhaps they develop more like a traditional tinker before being able to engage in biotinkering, or have a backer enabling more stealthy resource acquisition, in which case, the other indicated anomalies are likely to be more relevant for finding Appleseed."
Piggot nodded as Armsmaster finished, and began her summary - "Thank you, Armsmaster. I will adjust the Wards patrols to avoid those areas -" Vista furrowed her brows in irritation - " - and place more Protectorate and PRT patrols around them instead, with priority given to those who have the ability to move rapidly via vehicle or parahuman powers in case Appleseed decides to take humans rather than what has currently been reported by Tattletale. I will note the potential for other aspects of their specialty in their file." The Director looked particularly unhappy at that, "the preliminary rating for Appleseed is Tinker 5, Trump 3, given that they likely gained access to tinker-constructed hormone replacement therapy within at most 4 days after their estimated trigger event. Wards, Protectorate, you are dismissed."
The call ended, and Armsmaster was left in his lab with much more worrying thoughts than he had 20 minutes ago. He began working on miniaturizing more components of his halberd, and his day went on.
Cauldron Interlude - Contessa
On the 1st of March, Contessa twitched. This was the only external evidence of a shift in her Path, a tiny glitch already accounted for. Not a blind spot, not truly, but a fuzzy area of the Path that clarified shortly after with minor changes.
Contessa twitched several times over the next few days, her Path shifting further, all in tiny amounts centered around Brockton Bay. She merely informed the Triumvirate, and they went about their day, not yet identifying the situation as a minor but expanding out of context problem, because by their very nature, you couldn't see them coming.
[end of chapter - nya~]
Thank you all for suggested improvements to my dialogue ^.^ - I appreciate the suggestions.
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I woke up tense, just after noon, and dragged myself out of bed. My clothes were pretty disgusting and uncomfortable at this point but I put them on anyway - I needed to do something about getting new clothes and a way to wash them - then remembered the debit card and pin I took from a Nazi yesterday and went to leave after getting some water to drink from the taps in the warehouse.
However, as I looked out of the keyhole, I saw flashing lights and several PRT troopers patrolling the area next to vans. Shit, I thought to myself, how the fuck did they find me already! Heart racing, I ran back to my bed, lay down, and tried to think more about the situation before I got distracted by some other thing or just froze. They hadn't immediately barged in, which implied that either they didn't know I was there, or they were waiting for me to come out and talk to them. Or they thought I was too dangerous to approach without cape backup, I grimly noted, remembering the adage of "don't attack a tinker in their workshop".
I hated when people wanted to barge into my personal space, even if they wasn't strictly aware I was here, and I was already starting to panic from feeling trapped. I knew I had to get in and out somehow without being noticed, but I'd forgotten to make my tunnel drilling machine dig in a direction that would make it build an escape tunnel, dammit Zychi, so all I had on that front was a 100m deep 45 degree tunnel into the Brockton Bay aquifier (which come to think of it, was a problem I really had to deal with, I doubted it would be dry that far underground). Hey, at least I had massive piles of elemental resources now. I almost went to disable the drilling machine but then realised that if they detected me via electrical demand or seismic activity then they would definitely realise someone was here right now if something changed. Which meant I really needed some way to get out of here without being noticed. It didn't need to be too quiet - thank fuck for the soundproofing I added - but it needed to be doable with the admittedly massive piles of elements I now had from the ground.
Midway through thinking about the problem I realised that if the PRT knew of a new tinker, that also meant Coil knew, which was really fucking bad. Whatever the PRT had in store for me, Coil was worse. Who knows how many of those moving around on the street outside were his agents! Trying to suppress my rising panic, I continued thinking on the immediate problem to avoid just shutting down again. I could push a stealth specialisation and leg it, but there was only so much I could carry and I'd be pretty upset if I lost all the resources I had just accumulated from the ground below. It was an option I seriously considered, given the situation, but I was sure I could do better than that given the chance.
I wracked my brain, significantly less effectively than usual due to my tension, and realised that leaving the warehouse didn't require going through the door. This was Worm. This world had bullshit multidimensional capabilities, which meant, for me, a good option was pocket dimensions. I switched my specialty to 3 charges of Pocket Dimension tinker (now I was stealing Toybox's shtick instead of Coil's! hah!), and 2 charges of Scrapyard tinker, then gulped at the power requirements. While pocket dimensions took no power to maintain and only a trickle to open a Doormaker-style portal to, the burst of energy needed to make one in the first place was absolutely fucking obscene.
But I had an idea. I now had massive piles of resources - in raw element form anyway - which I could use to generate power. I was thinking some kind of graphite-based supercapacitor (I had enough carbon for a pretty massive one) attached to a hydrogen-powered fusion reactor (since I was a tinker and that meant I could apparently make nuclear fusion happen from mostly-raw elements as a construction base, and once again I was reminded of the sheer level of bullshit involved), and attached to a pocket dimension creation and access device. The fusion reactor itself would take a concerning amount of electricity to jolt it to start by electrolysing some water into fuel - which was bound to be noticed - along with the heat inherent to transmission of the kind of power I was considering messing with here.
As such, I wanted the pocket dimension generator and access device available first, before running through and generating power. Shifting my specialty over to Nuclear Fusion and Scrapyard, I estimated the resources to build a primitive fusion reactor and compared it with the pocket dimension initialisation device. I had a problem - insufficient processors. I had these absolutely wonderful CNC processors, but I needed at least two to manage both the fusion reactor and the dimension generator (the access device was simple enough that I could manually mess around with the coordinates and it automatically anchored to Earth's rotation unless I designed it not to - thank you, shard-bullshit-powered-tinkertech!), but I only had one available processor, from my customised CNC machine that I had been using to construct drill bits beforehand.
I considered giving up and trying to sneak out - I really wanted to stop panicking so badly, and those PRT troopers seemed perfectly content to continue patrols until something came up - but frankly my desire for a personal space that no-one could touch was really pushing me to make a pocket dimension rather than running. Within a few minutes I had come up with a solution - if a sketchy as fuck one - that involved me charging up a graphite-based supercapacitor with the fusion reactor, then taking out the chip, reprogramming it as fast as possible, putting it in my pocket dimension initialiser, and dumping the supercapacitor's output into that as fast as possible.
The final part of the (very rushed and questionably safe) plan was figuring out how exactly to reprogram that chip quick enough. I dumped two charges into Pocket Dimension tinkering, and 3 into small-executable programming, and pushed my power for a program that could manage the pocket dimension device I wanted to build, a program structure in my mind that I would remember details of so it would come back to me quicker. I didn't even need to write it to be able to pull it back from my power with just a rough outline, as far as I could tell.
And so, I went to work building devices in tinker fugue, my hands nearly a blur and my last, custom, CNC machine running at full pelt. Silicon carbide and graphite casings around the fusion core, disassembling the custom CNC machine for pocket dimension machine frames, and ripping some bits of sheet metal off the warehouse ceiling, and within three hours - at about mid afternoon - I had completely done making all the components. The fusion reactor would probably only survive a few hours, but it only needed to last a few minutes. The supercapacitor was sufficiently simple that it would actually work fine for an extended period of time. The pocket dimension generator was essentially a one-time device that would probably explode if I tried to use it a second time. I had only enough carbon left to construct a miniature battery-like supercapacitor in my handheld pocket dimension opener that would hold enough charge to last for millions of portal openings (pocket dimensions had extremely low energy costs for opening portals to and from the universe they were constructed from).
With some trepidation, I started the electrolysation process of incoming water, feeding hydrogen into my hack-job of a fusion reactor. I pulled the lever, and a shuddering jolt of electricity exploded through the wires, melting the cable I had used to initiate the fusion process, emitting a loud bang. Fuck, they probably heard that.
Perspective - PRT Trooper Michaels
Michaels had had a fairly uninteresting patrol. Orders from above stated that this was one of five locations potentially home to the tinker laboratory of the biotinker, codename Appleseed, around which extra patrols had been assigned. So far, it had been an uneventful afternoon - just how he liked it. Whenever things got "interesting" around parahumans, he mused, we tend to be the ones to have to deal with it.
Of course, that was when he heard a shuddering bang from within a warehouse across the street, and gruffly talked into the radio "Officer Jones, reporting an unusual noise from warehouse 5, sounded like some kind of explosion, sir". The response he got was simple and professional. "Orders are to stay back and do not engage. That is likely a tinker workshop. I've already notified our superiors, the Protectorate should be here to handle this in about 8 minutes."
"Thermals indicate a high temperature in the warehouse. Continuous, not decreasing. It seems like something high-energy is going on, sir", he curtly stated. Something was definitely going on - the explosion hadn't been the end of it - and continuous maintained high temperature was something the Protectorate definitely needed to know about. For now, though, his job was done, and he ran into the PRT van that had brought him here to move further away in case of another explosion or something more serious.
Perspective - Zychi in the warehouse
c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, I thought to myself, pacing and jumping and generally being a fidgety, anxious mess, hurry up and fill the fucking capacitor already. It had been about 3 minutes, and the capacitor was about 95% full. 20 seconds later and the indicator light turned green. I ran over to the fusion reactor, slammed the extremely hot "off" button and ripped out the processor as fast as possible without bending any of the legs. Then I half ran, half bounced over to the program, heart racing, instinctively pushing my specialty charges to those that I required and my fingers were a painful blur as I punched in the program on the chip programmer as fast as I possibly could, the one I'd designed to be fast to enter, and it took almost 4 minutes. I could hear the faint sound of a motorcycle approaching - Armsmaster, I noted grimly - as I ran to my pocket dimension machine and nearly broke the damn CNC processor putting it in the slot I made. I felt like I was going to fucking explode, as I finally heard Armsmaster stop right outside the door. My thoughts were an even more jumbled mess than usual, as I heard a gruff "Open the door, or I will enter myself in 10 seconds."
fuck fuck FUCK where did I put the button on this FUCKING THING I half-muttered to myself in blind panic.
Five seconds later (it was not 10, Armsmaster lied to me!), and I heard a resounding crash on the other side of the warehouse as the door folded in the face of Armsmaster's admittedly pretty cool armoured boot. And then, groping my hands around the pocket dimension initialiser, I found the button and absolutely slammed it as hard as fucking possible. A deep rumble permeated the machine and the warehouse, as Armsmaster asked in his almost expected manner "Come quietly for a chat with the PRT. We will be forced to treat you as a villain, Appleseed, if you fight me", while marching toward me, every one of his thuds on the warehouse floor reminding me of the deep shit I was currently in.
I almost froze, but this time my flight response won out as the indicator on my handheld pocket dimension remote turned a blessed, blessed fucking green, and I pointed at the floor next to me, hit the button to see the most wonderful sight this entire morning - a purple-edged, swirling portal - on the floor big enough to fit me through at full height. Armsmaster reached his arm out towards me when I literally jumped straight into the portal and slammed the close button on my remote, hitting the floor of my pocket dimension on my arse with a muted, mildly bruising thud.
Lying down, I shook violently. That level of anxiety is not good for anyone. My thoughts were fuzzy and fragmented, my body was weaker than noodles, and I could swear my heart was still running at some 180 beats per minute. But I was safe. I was in my own space. No-one could attack me, not here.
The size of the thing was a roughly 10mx 10m x 10m cubic area - my shard ensured that pocket dimensions I constructed had air in them (unless of course I used more advanced tinker blueprints and specified otherwise), and the edges were a rich, deep purple that made me happy to look at, and didn't hurt my eyes. But I couldn't collapse yet, not really. I needed to grab my resources from the warehouse that used to be my personal space but got trampled all over by the PRT and Protectorate. Luckily I didn't need to actually go there myself, I could just think with portals, so to speak.
Still shaky from the adrenaline, I began fiddling with my portal opener, experimentally trying out my initial coordinates. The portal opener allowed me to control the portal size, which meant I could make a microportal to look through before doing anything - which is what I did. I could see Armsmaster examining at the remains of the CNC machine and the disabled fusion reactor, and in a bit of minor spite at him basically shoving his way into my personal space I opened a portal right beneath the reactor, let it fall through, then immediately shrank the portal to see Armsmaster's irritated face. It didn't take me long to drag my bed into the pocket dimension along with the driller and elemental separation device, and the remaining resources from it (which made it mildly cramped in here but I liked it that way).
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
This was extremely thrilling to write, and hopefully it's decent to read too :3
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm - cw ableism (basically the kind of people applying to be hired thugs aren't exactly part of the neurodivergency movement, who knew?)]
Pulling myself up from the floor of my cozy, comfy, safe pocket dimension, I moved to lie on my bed and start thinking about how to deal with things. Given the way shard powers worked, I knew that even my low level interdimensional ability (with my pocket dimension) would be a serious boost, but every time I opened a portal for any extended period of time I was making myself vulnerable to attack. Perhaps I was paranoid (OK, I was definitely paranoid) but I had zero doubts the PRT would willingly smash their way in here given the chance, let alone villains or Cauldron. I was feeling vulnerable at the moment, much more than usual, and I was half-tempted to just hide in here forever, except I did unfortunately need to eat, and I wanted to actually effect change on the world.
To get food and clothes and a laptop, I would have to open a portal somewhere, step out, grab cash from a cash machine using the card and pin I got from that Nazi, and go to some shops. It was a worrying testament to my mental state that the thought of doing this made me so intensely afraid. Self-reflection at the very least meant I was aware of what to do in such a situation - so despite lacking my usual hot chocolate, I curled up in bed and touched the walls of the corner of my comfortable, safe pocket dimension I was situated in to try and ground myself, which helped despite the constant sense of body dysphoria. I was tired, and so tempted to sleep, but I needed to get more food, so after about half an hour of self-care, I dragged myself back out of bed, grabbed my portal device, and began making microportals high above Brockton Bay and slowly moved them closer to locate the boardwalk.
Once I found the boardwalk coordinates, I took a look around through the microportal. No Tattletale this time as far as I could see, and as funny as that would be - her facial expression last time was oddly amusing - I was also glad I didn't have to worry about her trying to force an interaction. I found a cash point near the middle of the boardwalk, and then found an alleyway about 10 metres away that was in a fairly hidden spot. As such, I pointed the portal remote to the coordinates of a wall in the alleyway, and ripped open a portal on the inner wall of my home.
Quickly moving out of the portal and closing it behind me, I went to the cashpoint and took out about $800, in 3 separate goes to avoid the cashpoint limit. Bundling the cash in my pockets, I moved down the boardwalk towards a clothes shop, the Boardwalk Enforcers looking at me warily. My clothes must look much worse than they did the last time I came down here, I thought, as I entered into a clothes shop, and was immediately hit with the dysphoria from binary-gendered clothing because of course they had to do the same thing here as on my primary Earth that made getting clothes so difficult and uncomfortable. With some degree of frustration, I made my way through both the men's and women's section, picking out some simple clothes and some more pretty ones that I could make into various pride flags because I now had a pocket dimension and could flaunt my queer-ass self and not get beaten by Nazis whenever they felt like it! hah!
Coming out of the clothes shop, I saw some Enforcers start trailing me. It seems they did not trust me, for whatever reason. Anyway, I thought, let's go grab a laptop and a fibre router. So I did, walking down the boardwalk some more, admiring the sort of grey and underwhelming ocean, the shipwrecks of the Graveyard in the distance, and came across a simple laptop shop, and bought one with decent specs for the tech level on Bet, though it was pretty bad compared to the one I had before.
All was well, until all wasn't well and the Enforcers moved towards me, brandishing their bats in my face from in front and behind me. "Your kind ain't welcome here," one said, clearly withholding the urge to hit me immediately, "We'll give you a beating, then you'll know not to come back," - I was still sort of half processing this when the guy in front of me snapped his fingers at me, "are you even paying attention to me, boy. Fuck off or get beat!" while another muttered "probably a mental case or a druggie," and then my brain finally caught up with what was going on, I grabbed my pocket dimension portal generator, and fell through the floor onto my bed, comfortable and safe. I guess people were just more dickish here about my attention problems huh - Brockton Bay was Nazi central after all. Apparently they were willing to beat me because I looked poor and couldn't pay attention so well sometimes, and they probably just assumed I was a thief - or maybe not, they might have just felt like it - without even checking. God, what a load of arseholes, I thought, literally just corporate-backed thugs. Mentally pulling myself out of my annoyance and anxiety, I decided that distracting myself with tinkering was probably a good idea.
The thing I probably needed most - other than the food I apparently forgot about in the hubbub with the Enforcers - was Internet, water, and electricity access. As such, I thought about the kind of specialty that would let me interrupt and uninterrupt those kinds of resource lines efficiently. A bit more thinking and I finally came up with the answer - shifting all of my specialty towards Temporary Infrastructure Siphons, I pushed on my powers for various ideas on interrupting water, ethernet, and electricity lines. No point in fiddling with routers if there was someone you could steal internet from, after all.
Shifting one charge towards Modularity, I mentally constructed a blueprint for a device that would operate three feeds simultaneously - the aforementioned ethernet, water, and electricity (the last plugged directly into the grid) - when provided with portals appropriately close to the relevant cabling. Entirely electromechanical, too, no processors required at all, it was one of the most simple and effective devices I'd actually built, in my view. Or would build, I supposed to myself, a task which ended up taking barely an hour of effort given how genuinely simple it was in comparison to some of the other tinker bullshit I'd made before.
It was with great pleasure that I opened portals to the inside of Medhall's server room, and the water and electrical mains that fed into the building. [end of chapter (and of the arc) - nyaa~]
So, "me in worm" is finally set up with internet access and basic resources, with a safe place to retreat to, and the arc of Initialisation is complete ^.^
There will be significant fun times ahead.
Sorry for the delay, my laptop charger died, but I have a new one now [disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I cringed. Earth Bet did not have SSDs yet, so installing Linux on my newly obtained laptop took forever. Slow, slow, slow. Almost half an hour later, it was finally done, and then I got distracted for two hours messing with the configuration files because that's something I apparently couldn't resist doing even so far from my original home.
At least I now knew the date, connected to the internet. March the 5th, 2011. I spent another hour or so looking up other information and verifying it matched Worm canon. Skitter did not exist yet, the Undersiders existed with their canon powers, the case 53s all matched what I remembered, and there was only one Entity - Zion - flying around. Endbringers were real and there was a Simurgh attack on Canberra in February.
As such, I began constructing a deadswitch (or rather several). I cut off all the portals to the outside, which would hopefully at least hinder Cauldron if Contessa decided to kill me right now. Essentially, I created a series of informational bombs, which would be scattered around the Internet as well as in my pocket dimension. It contained all the most dangerous information I knew - the exact nature of Shards and powers, the existence of Cauldron and their responsibility for case 53s as well as their purpose, the Triumvirate's membership, the power of Contessa herself, the existence of a third Entity, and the method I knew to defeat Zion from the original Worm story in case Cauldron decided to kill me anyway despite the information in question being sufficient to initiate the apocalypse. I had already probably derailed things enough - the butterfly effect is seriously potent - to change the way Taylor Hebert developed and such. Probably not yet enough to affect the Lung fight, but long term? The original timeline was already derailed by my mere existence - and insurance to give humanity a chance even in the worst-case scenario of my death was something I felt almost obligated to give.
I also had to pick some kind of cape name - because the one the PRT gave me was not one I liked - to attribute the information to so people knew who had had their deadswitch set off. While I cared fairly little about the secret identity thing in theory, it would at least be nice to be able to go outside freely, even if I still felt too vulnerable to do so at the moment after the Armsmaster incident, and the Boardwalk Enforcers being dicks. I wanted something obscure, but indicative of my powers. Unfortunately - or fortunately, for me at least - people's expectations of power restrictions would ensure they never expected some of the sheer bullshit I would probably be able to pull due to my power's conceptual nature. I eventually decided on a multifaceted and obscure statement on my powers and goals, and called myself "trans_morphic". Much of the stuff I wanted to do would be anonymous - I did not want people putting me at the front and centre of the things I did, becoming an icon was definitively not a goal (in fact if I did become an icon or central figure, that was an exploitable point of failure or attack).
Another thing, required for a deadswitch on myself, was something that would actually identify me being dead. I didn't want it to be an external device that could be stolen, it couldn't be something I had to periodically think about - I didn't trust myself not to forget - and it had to be something I was eventually able to disable. Fortunately for me, there was something that had the properties required to create such a thing - my shard.
It was with some trepidation that I pushed parts of my specialty into something no normal parahuman could do. Personal Shard Interface got two charges, and Dead Switches got three charges. Interfacing with my shard for basic lifesigns was almost trivial - after all my power was orchestrating my tinkering and it could simply recognise what I wanted and inject a blackbox into my tech - and a side result of this was that I didn't need to upload the files to anywhere but the primitive shard interface device. All I needed to do was install some commands in response to specific wireless signals in various computers and the shard would actually handle the rest if I died, uploading the information in an unstoppable barrage across the public internet as well as the various darknets present on Earth Bet (Tor did not exist here, apparently I2P had gained significant traction instead, and was of comparable size to Tor in my original Earth).
Once I had the primitive shard interface design in my head, I pulled some of the resources from my pile and began a fugue that embodied the power of shard tinker bullshit. The only contents of the design were a USB connector to my laptop, and a giant black-boxed component that was hooked directly to it. I didn't even need to write a driver for it, it acted just like a portable USB drive, so it only took a fraction of a second to put all the deadswitch information bombs into my shard (wonderful thing that it was), and that part was done.
The next part of the process was installing different commands in different places. On my laptop it was a trivial modification of the Linux kernel and wireless drivers to wake up on the particular type of message that would be sent through a shard portal in case I died, and the laptop would dump the transmitted drive contents onto various file sites, PHO (re-creating a thread if it was deleted) and send them to numerous news organisations.
I then designed malware that would create similar commands in a computer connected to a malicious USB device. Installing Linux onto the laptop had required a USB stick that I obtained beforehand while buying the laptop, so I just rewrote the USB stick firmware to engage in the infectious behaviour. I was essentially done at this point, setting up my self-defense system as insurance against Cauldron. I already had one deadswitch in my laptop, so they probably couldn't kill me the moment I opened up a portal. Within a couple hours I'd infected every single Medhall server, and I'd managed to sneak the USB into a port on one of the PRT computers as well, though it took some time to find the building in the first place.
This is when it finally sunk in that my portal device was global, so I began thinking about other places to hide my deadswitch code. I opened a microportal far above the Earth's atmosphere (there was an odd whistling sound and I shut it quickly after finding the coordinates required to look over Europe), and narrowed down on Germany. Anxiously, I opened portals in several government buildings and plugged the USB in a fraction of computers there. I was a bit miffed that I lacked information on the Gessellschaft, or I would have totally infected their shit.
The deadswitch was only a temporary defense against Cauldron and only applied to myself, unfortunately. It would do for now, though, and let me interact and tinker relatively freely with less worry about them killing me in my sleep. Path to Victory was hard to counter fully, however, so I wasn't going to be completely incautious (as much as that was possible given my occasional impulsive tendencies).
After getting the deadswitch set up, I really could do with getting food, and I was torn between doing so and just curling up and hiding in my pocket dimension for a while. I could feel the fuzziness from food deprivation beginning to set in, and I knew I needed to eat, but I was still so stressed. Convincing myself to even open a portal out of my pocket dimension was pretty difficult, but I eventually managed to look around with a microportal and go to some random shop in the US and pick up some groceries, and a subpar Cornish Pastie that I still ate because I was famished.
In terms of tech and resources, I was still struggling compared to what I should be able to do. All the tech I'd managed so far was completed with minimal access to complex tools and an extremely limited supply of processing power. My primary tinker goal right now, I decided, would have to be the production of CPUs and some more advanced manufacturing methods - I was already getting excited about the possibility of nanoswarms - and also hopefully something that would let me use graphene-based CPU designs (multilayer graphene, after all, has numerous properties that allow it to be used as CPU base material with minimal doping requirements as compared to silicon). Unfortunately I lacked anything with remotely enough precision (my shard allowed me to make nanoscale materials by hand, but only if their structure was uniform in nature and the material I had was relatively pure), so I'd have to start from relative simplicity until I had the precision tools to bootstrap production of CPUs of higher power than the CNC chips I currently had available.
As for social connection and physical affection, I was still sorely lacking, and it was starting to have a fairly significant effect on my general mental state. I could feel the anxiety and negative thought patterns creeping in more than ever. I resolved to myself to at least go on PHO or some other site soon and try and talk to people there to help with the problem, to keep myself at least functional. Then I remembered I should probably deal with the Dragonslayers and help Dragon too. There was so damn much to do, like release Jack Slash's true power, or the Siberian's secret, and more. So much more information that I should let loose. I fully intended to out Coil at some point soon as well, because Coil is an arsehole - after warning his victims and Director Piggot of course.
I figured my mode of operation would be trollish - because honestly I'd always wanted to do something like that - and would involve me basically putting pieces of paper in the appropriate part of the PRT building. That did mean I had to obtain paper though, some pens, and a printer - which I did with a couple more anxious ventures outside of my comfy pocket of spacetime. Well, it wasn't that comfy yet - it was still too big and lacked the tight corners and furniture I liked especially around my bed - but it would get there.
It was with little fanfare then, that Operation: Troll Earth BetWith Information, began, and I started to type several letters on my laptop...
With a cackle of glee, I printed off the letters, and readied my portal opener. [end of chapter - nya~]
