I've been looking for both a reason to have a story on SV and a reason to do something with the Starfinder rules in Worm for a while now, and the muse bit me while I had an hour to spare at work so... here you go. First chapters are always kind of boring in Tinker stories aren't they? Let me know what you think - I'm actually not good at writing inserts of any stripe.
Stop me if you've heard this story before.
I died. Not horrifically or anything. As a point of fact, I died for reasons that are quite frankly so embarrassing that simply thinking about them makes me want to self terminate.
See, I owned and loved two cats. The furry little monsters were easily the highlight of my day, at least recently.
I was also, deathly allergic to cats.
So you can probably see where this is going already, but just so that we're all on the same page, I do have some countermeasures. I took allergy shots three times a year, had some very expensive allergy medicine, and maintained stock of inhalers that I used often and freely.
It's just, I hadn't accounted for a global pandemic shutting down all the allergists in the city, making it exponentially harder to keep up my stock of all those things.
Hence, I died in bed with my cat sitting on my chest, suffocating to death because of my asthma, staring stupidly at my empty inhaler, while starbursts indicating I was running out of oxygen began to overtake my vision.
See? Embarrassing.
So, theres part one.
Part two is waking up again. As a fucking teenager. In a car. A car I didn't recognize driven by people I didn't know.
I had approximately thirty seconds of time to take in my radically different body shape and locale before that car crashed.
The next time I woke up, it was in a hospital, where I was told that my parents were both dead and also did I have any relatives that would interested in covering the bill?
I didn't know the answer to that question, and was honestly in sort of a daze as a result of all that aforementioned dying, then nearly dying, so I had just sort of shrugged numbly at the orderly who had asked, and then again at the police officer that had turned up to ask the same question.
Eventually they did find one of 'my' still living relatives, who blessedly didn't have to pay my hospital bill. Which is good because that would make for an extremely uncomfortable introduction. 'Hey Auntie, I need a place to crash till I'm eighteen, that'll be eight grand' was not my idea of a friendly introduction.
All that is to say, I find myself on a greyhound to Brockton Bay within a week.
Also, I had powers. You'd think that should have come earlier in the explanation but it hadn't been entirely relevant, and probably wouldn't have made any sense until I mentioned Brockton Bay.
I also hadn't really noticed I had powers until I got on the bus and suddenly had hours of time to myself to think. Tinker powers were sort of non-obvious that way. At the very least, they were sort of easy to dismiss as random intrusive thoughts while you had other things to be worrying about.
So yeah, I was familiar with this pattern. Isekai'd into a kid with Tinker powers, shuffled off to live in Brockton Bay with relatives, I mean.
I was in a Tinker of Fiction story. Probably. Maybe. My current Tinker focus looked liked it was dedicated to the technomagic bullshit that made up a most of the gear from the Starfinder tabletop rpg. That is, the scifi version of Dungeons & Dragons. So that lent some credence to the assumption, being fiction and all.
I just didn't notice any indication that my specialization could change, which was kind of worrying. I needed that sweet, sweet, overpowered bullshit if I was gonna survive on the Deathworld that was Earth Bet.
Muttering to myself about how irritating it was going to be to do puberty again - I was thirteen going in fourteen right now - I got off the bus, grabbed my travel suitcase, and patiently waited for the social worker who would be bringing me to my new family to pick me up.
Next stop, casa de Hebert!
---
The next stop, it turned out, was not the Heberts apparently. The social worker got me in her car and started driving, taking us through a roundabout route through the city that I suspect was aimed at avoiding any gang hotspots.
It provided an okay slice of what the city looked like as I watched it fly by through the window. Mostly, the whole place just looked dirty. Even the nicer areas had a distinct lack of city maintenance going on. Sidewalks were cracked all over the place, roads had so many potholes I was surprised we didn't lose a tire in transit, and obvious gangsters hung out groggily on street corners being ignored by all the other pedestrians like this was all completely normal.
I started to suspect we might not be going to the Heberts house when instead of parking infront of the charming little house with the broken front step I expected, we pulled up to an apartment building.
"Are... we in the right place?" I asked tentatively, eyeing the place with a critical eye. It wasn't completely terrible.
I just knew for a fact that Danny and Taylor Hebert didn't live in an apartment building.
"Yes. Give me a second John." My social worker stated apologetically, setting the car to idle in front of the building and getting out to make a phone call.
I frowned, trying to puzzle out the situation.
Maybe I was in one of those alt worlds where canon was dead and my foreknowledge would be useless?
I allowed myself to hold to that petty delusion for the entire time it took my new family to get down the elevator to help me bring my stuff inside and greet me.
The black woman who came down the stairs with her older teen son kind of clued me in to what was going on.
See, I'm black. At least, half black. That was true in both of my lifetimes. Hence, I hadn't really thought much about it when I was isekai'd here - it was completely normal to me.
In retrospect, it would make a lot of sense for my extended family to therefore also be black. For a second I even managed to get my hopes up, thinking I was going to be with the Laborn family. Honestly, that would be great. I could keep Grue from being a stupid villain, protect Aisha from her Mom's boyfriends and-
"John, this is your Aunt, Dianne Hess, and your cousin Terry." The social worker said, introducing the pair to me.
I fairly felt my eyes cross at that, but managed to get out a strangled greeting that I guess Dianne misunderstood as sadness, on account of the dead parents and all that, because she hustled forward to pull me into a hug.
"Come here. You're so tall now!" She comforted me like she actually knew me which... she might. I could see Terry eyeing me speculatively out of the corner of my eye and had to suppress a grimace.
I knew literally nothing about this family, because they hadn't been mentioned much in canon beyond 'they exist'.
I was still trying to parse that while my suitcase of stuff was given to Terry, and the social worker left.
I only half paid attention while Auntie explained what the button sequence was to call our apartment, which was on the second floor somewhere apparently.
I remained mostly numb and uncommunicative for the entire trip, until I was finally led into our apartment - 202 - and shuffled into the living room where an older man was watching television.
"Gerard, this is my nephew John." Auntie introduced me. It wasn't lost on me the way that Terry appeared to be intentionally ignoring the guy, or how he seemed entirely non-plussed at my existence.
"Wheres he gonna sleep?" Gerard asked eventually, gesturing with the neck of a bear bottle around the small apartment. There were only four rooms leading off from the single hallway, not including the kitchen which was actually just an extension of the living room. Presumably one of those rooms was a bathroom, which meant there were only three bedrooms - one for each of the Hess kids and one for Auntie and her... boyfriend? Husband?
I didn't know and that irked me way more than it probably should have.
"He can stay in my room. Soph'll fucking explode if she has to share." Terry put forth quickly.
"Language!" Auntie immediately chided him, to which Terry - in true teenager fashion - turned away just enough to roll his eyes.
Now, in a normal household, that'd be it. I'd been here for five minutes tops and almost everyone present still had their shoes on in the entryway.
Then Gerard handily demonstrates the atmosphere that probably led to Sophia's trigger event, by jumping up and angrily stomping toward him.
"You respect your Mother!" He roared, lifting a hand to box my cousin about the head. It was, quite frankly, cartoonish how fast he went from zero to one hundred here, and it freaked me the hell out.
This is probably an adequate time to explain something about myself. When faced with a scenario that makes me panic, I always double down. It isn't intentional. I just find that following through on a bad decision is usually more effective than taking to long to decide and making no decision at all.
Now since I came from a functional family, in a functional society, in a functional city where the moral standards of your average person haven't been warped by years of sharing space with literal Nazi's, I found domestic abuse to be super fucked up, even if was probably not that outlandish in Brockton Bay.
So I did what any shocked, disgusted kid would do.
I kicked my Auntie's boyfriend in the balls so hard he lifted an inch off the ground.
There was a stunned silence wherein everyone present turned to look at me incredulously, except for Gerard who just looked like he might burst a blood vessel trying to kill me with his mind.
"...My bad." I offered weakly, at just about the same time Gerard's apoplectic rage managed to overcome the pain he was probably feeling.
I don't remember much of what happened after that because the back of the head was the first place ol' Gerard hit me.
Small favours.
---
"Nnggggg..." I groaned as I woke up. My everything hurt. One of my eyes wouldn't open properly, and it breathing made it feel like I had glass shards in my lungs.
I really fucking hope that dick didn't break my god damn ribs.
"You aight?" Terry asked me quickly, jerking upward from where he was sitting next to the bed I was in ontop of what looked like an air mattress. The room was dark despite the blinds on the window being open, so I guess it was night time, but I could still see the black eye on his face where he had obviously been hit after G man was done bludgeoning me half to death.
I shot him an incredulous look.
"You know what I mean man." Terry said in exasperation, leaning over me and poking at me ribs like he knew what he was doing - which he didn't.
I could tinker up something to heal myself, ut Starfinder crafting was kind of expensive. The three forms of healing I could easily make were a Serum - which would require a bunch of chemicals I doubt we had on hand - a Crystal, Starfinders equivalent of scrolls from D&D - again prohibitive because I doubted we had a jewelers kit and rare gems laying around - or a Spell Chip - which would require I build an entire computer for the purposes of having it cast spells for me.
Of the three options, that last one was my best bet, requiring only that I build the Spell Computer and program the spell, but even that wasn't something I foresaw myself being able to easily get ahold of the materials to create.
In otherwords, I was screwed. I also had school tommorow, which meant I was going to have to explain all of this.
"I'll live. Even if I wish I knew Panacea right about now." I complained.
"Who?" Terry asked me quizzically, leaving me staring at him stupidly.
"Pa- the New Wave healer?" I tried again.
"The New Wave chick? She's new right? Alexandria package or some shit?" Terry mused, stepping away from me.
That didn't sound right.
"...Terry, humour me for a second, but uh... what year is it?" I asked, already feeling a headache coming along.
"Shit, you got it bad. I'ma get some ice. Don't move or wake Gerard up or he'll beat your ass again." Terry told me, stepping away to move to his door, which he had apparently attempted to soundproof with a towel by rolling it up and stuffing it in the crack at the bottom of the door.
"Seriously what year is it?" I asked urgently. I had been expecting the usual shenanigans - to drop in somewhere slightly before canon. Maybe a few months at best. I couldnt remember when Amy had triggered, but I was pretty sure it was just a year or two before canon. If she hadn't triggered yet then...
"Two thousand nine. Now shut the hell up." Terry hissed at me, voice becoming quiet as he quickly opened the door to our now shared bedroom and slipped outside.
I stared stupidly after him, pondering that for a moment. I didn't know all that much abkut the period before Worm started. It was mostly blank to me.
As if to highlight this growing sense of confusion, a girl slipped from the doorway on the far side of the hallway and into the room with me. She was about my age, maybe a bit younger, with an annoyed look on her face as she stood over me.
"...Yo?" I whispered in greeting.
"You're our cousin?" She asked me brusquely to which I attempted to nod back, stopping when it hurt to much to shift my neck that quickly.
"...He's gonna be fucking worse now." She grunted at me.
"...sorry?" I tried again. I was trying to remember if Sophia even had powers yet.
She snorted at my halfhearted apology.
"Don't be. Fuck him." She hissed venomously.
Staring up at her, I realized something.
Sophia Hess has probably more to do with the formation of Taylor Hebert as a character than anyone else besides maybe Emma - who I could get access to through her if I was lucky. She was also, an extremely messed up person if today was any indication.
She wasn't quite as close to the action as Taylor herself, but she was pretty close, at least to start with.
Plus she was family. You don't bitch out on family.
So I opened my mouth and said something extremely stupid.
"I've got powers." I blurted out, which caused her eye to twitch violently, and her mouth to open with what was no doubt a sharp retort before Terry came sliding back into the room with the bag of ice for my eye.
He eyed us both from the doorway, then shrugged.
Sophia, grouchy bitch she was, obviously decided that this wasn't something we were going to talk about right now, because she grunted again and left without saying a word to her older brother.
"She'll get used to you eventually." Terry apologized for her automatically, despite the fact that she hadn't actually done anything.
I thought that was quite telling, but didn't say anything about it. I just grunted my own wordless response, accepted the ice bag, and lay back down.
I had a feeling life was about to get very exhausting.
The next time I woke up, it was in a hospital, where I was told that my parents were both dead and also did I have any relatives that would interested in covering the bill?
Oooh, I'm into it. This has loads of my favorite things; Peggy Sue time shenanigans, tinkering in general, Starfinder, background characters getting time in the spotlight and a villainous redemption. Super watching this one.
They're probably thinking that because the most famous worm peggy sue (the longest anyway) is Taylor coming back to the 80's without powers by ack with a name i forgot. I'm not interested in rereading it.
I woke up the next day feeling exactly as shitty as you might expect. The bag of ice I had fallen asleep with on my face had long since melted and fallen off, leaving most of my pillow moist and cold.
Irked, I jerkily pushed myself up, feeling the various aches and pains across my body responding to the sudden wakefulness. To my right, Terry was still asleep, and to my left, the sun was just beginning to crest the horizon through the window.
My power, apparently deciding to be 'helpful' in a way I'm sure only an alien computer would consider 'helpful' promptly chose that moment to ram a half dozen options for healing myself to the forefront of my mind.
Now, as I mentioned yesterday night, an overwhelming majority of - basically all of then really - of those options were inaccessible to me at the moment. Truthfully, I probably wouldn't use them even if I did have access to the materials. I didn't have a viable excuse for being magically healed of all injury. Which was a shame because while my left eye was now capable of opening, it was still swollen and hurt in a way that made me feel fairly homicidal.
My power quickly reminded me that I had to be careful with my impulse control by quickly offering me a number of ways to kill Gerard.
Most of which included lasers and explosions, with a lesser number of them being based on poisoning him.
So I shelved that thought and considered my situation.
I had maybe a year and a half, two years tops before canon started. I was pretty sure Taylor's mom was dead already, so there wasn't anything I could do about that. Starfinder had true resurrection, but it had some pretty strict limitations. For one thing, you had to cast the spell on someone within days of their death. Since Annette would have been dead for months now at this point, if not years, that sort of precluded her as a valid target.
Just for argument's sake, I decided to try and prod my power for the plans for the fifth level spell gem I would need to be able to cast the spell and found myself frowning up at the ceiling.
All I was getting was Spell Gems for zero level spells. None of which were even healing spells. Curiously, I prodded about some more. I focused on weapons and got a library of all the starter gear your average Starfinder character would have. Level One gear basically. Armor? Same thing.
Realizing what was going on I couldn't help but groan.
Starfinder had a system of measurement for all the items - and I do mean every item -in the game that equated specific pieces of gear with character levels. A level one character could use a level twenty-piece of equipment if they happened to find it - it wasn't a use restriction - they simply weren't able to craft or obtain higher-level equipment for some inane reason.
My power seemed to function based on the same principle. I would have to make and use first-level stuff to get access to second-level stuff and so on and so forth. Just like that, my dreams of spending the next two years building a Starship so that I could show up to the Leviathan fight with the planet-busting hardware needed to kill the stupid lizard went up in smoke. Suddenly, I had to start from square one.
What fresh bullshit was that? I was the outside context problem! I was supposed to be overpowered and bullshit, so I could Gary Stu my way through this hellhole and retire on a starship on the moon or something! Worse, I effectively had to do the work of 'leveling up' without any of the benefits you would expect from that kind of thing. I wasn't the Gamer. I didn't have a system, a menu, or a bunch of special bullshit just for me that would let me power level my way to godhood in six months flat. It was an entirely arbitrary limit on my tinkering.
Angry with the situation, I consciously put the entire thing out of my mind for a moment, returning to my previous train of thought. I had a year and change till canon. There was a fairly small list of things I could easily affect in that time. I could work on making Sophia less of an unholy bitch, or at the very least, keep her aggression directed towards people who deserved it instead of perpetrating the kind of Disney villain, anti-bullying PSA bullshit she apparently went with in the main timeline. I could maybe try and help Panacea, though I had no doubts that the situation was way more complicated and hard to unravel than just showing up and being nice to her. I could make sure Taylor didn't get bullied half to death.
There were some other secondary objectives I could probably look at, but since I was evidently not the God-King of Tinkertown, I also had to spend time keeping myself alive and functional, which meant I had to limit myself until I unlocked the actually useful parts of Starfinder tech.
Which brought me back around to my power... or lack thereof. I was a Tinker without any gear or resources. The most immediately useful things I could make myself were a suit of armor and some weapons. Which was annoying, because what I really wanted, was some god damn magic.
I pondered the question of how to proceed for most of the early morning after that, at least until Terry woke up, groggily rolling to his feet and digging around in his drawer for clothes before throwing the entire bundle under one arm and wordlessly disappearing through the door. A minute later I heard the shower running in the next room.
I figured that was as good a queue as any to get up myself and finally managed to force myself to a standing position. Glancing around I found my suitcase, and started digging around for a change of clothes. Blessedly, whomever I had been before my mind had been jammed into this body had a similar taste in clothes to me, so I had no problem grabbing a pair of loose jeans and a baggy t-shirt to start off my day.
The rest of the morning went pretty quietly apace like that. Auntie had already put out some toast for all of us to have for breakfast by the time I had been in and out of the shower, and Gerard was nowhere to be seen, presumably having gone to work already. She shot me an apologetic wince when she saw my face, but otherwise didn't comment. In fact, she didn't say anything at all to me, just sat on the couch watching my and Terry nibble on our toast while an awkward atmosphere settled across the living room.
That atmosphere was only broken when Sophia stomped into the room, obvious bags under her eyes. She took one look around the room, ignored her mother, jutted her chin out in greeting to Terry, then locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.
"You're coming to school with me." She stated. I'm certain it was supposed to be a question. I already knew ahead of time that I was going to be going to school with Sophia, so it made sense that she would be walking there with me - but Sophia didn't phrase it like a question. She phrased it like an order.
"Guess so." I replied, frowning slightly around a mouthful of toast, holding eye contact with her.
Now, the types of power games children play before becoming adults always seem drastically more high tension than they do once you get older. I'm sure if I was a normal kid, I would register this as a power game of some kind. Especially knowing that Sophia had her whole fucked up Predator/Prey thing going on.
As a functioning adult who was never much for social mores as a kid in the first place, I just did it out of polite habit then moved on when we were done talking. Of course, Sophia apparently scanned the entire micro-interaction entirely differently from me, because she nodded once like she approved and then shifted to have her own piece of toast. She seemed tired enough that it wouldn't be entirely surprising if she just fell over onto her plate and started snoring, but equally, sort of seemed to be keeping herself behaving as though she wasn't bone tired by sheer force of spite.
If I was being honest, the entire thing was incredibly obvious, and the fact that Auntie hadn't noticed said an awful lot about her skills as a parent - or lack thereof.
Eventually, we all grabbed our bags, put our shoes on, and headed off to school. Terry walked us most of the way to our school before turning around to head to his own - us being in middle school and him being in high school. I wasn't positive but I'm pretty sure he graduated this year actually.
The second it looked like no one was in earshot of us, Sophia whirled on me like she had been waiting the entire time for the opportunity.
"What do you mean you have powers." She hissed at me in the loudest 'quiet' voice I have ever heard in my life.
"...My parents died. I got powers. It's not hard." I explained patiently, switching from distractedly thinking on loadouts for my first set of tinkertech to paying attention to my surroundings. Was Coil a thing in 2009? If he was, he was exactly the kind of ass clown that would 'luckily' hear this kind of conversation somehow.
"Then why the fuck did you tell me?" She continued shifting closer to me - probably because in her mind that was threatening but well... she was a thirteen year old girl.
Now, the reason I had told Sophia I had powers was because I knew that at this point in her career she was lonely enough to latch onto Emma for whatever reason, going so far as to unmask to her and seek her out privately. Presumably, if she wasn't so desperate she wouldn't go straight for the redhead later on, keeping her fucked up Predator/Prey mindset away from the fragile girl.
Also, I knew she had powers and wanted to work with her because her power was terrifying.
But I couldn't say any of that. So...
"I... kind of figured we could do something about Gerard?" I tried hesitantly. Sophia snorted like that was the dumbing thing she'd ever heard.
"He pays the bills. My Mom won't get rid of him." She quickly explained with a hint of fear in her tone that made me cringe inwardly. I'm pretty sure Gerard had something to do with her trigger event, so that made sense. No matter how powerful Sophia was as a Parahuman, that asshole would always be engraved on her psyche as bigger and stronger than her.
I mentally resolved to find a way to get rid of him before moving on with the conversation, the school looming up into the distance.
"So?" I continued, pushing Sophia to get on with the shit she obviously wanted to ask in the short time we had left.
"What are your powers?" She asked, easing away from me slightly.
"Tinker. Power Armor, Laser Guns. That kinda stuff." I answered noncommittally. Also quietly, since we were just sort of in the middle of the street.
"Can you make stuff that doesn't run on electricity?" She asked. Subtle, Sophia Hess was not. I wondered if maybe she had acquired some of her more notable skills at stealth and subterfuge later on in life. Despite having a power suited to it, Sophia seemed like she was about as good at subtle as your average Bull. I knew why she was asking of course. Her shadow form was incompatible with electricity. It was one of her big weaknesses. It also meant she probably couldn't carry anything too high tech with her when she was out caping.
I pondered the question for a second before two things leapt out at me. For one thing, nearly nothing I could make was low-tech enough not to use electricity. Secondarily to that though, I had fucking magic.
"I don't know about Armor..." I started, "...but I think I can rig up an energy weapon that doesn't use any electricity." I finally offered, contemplating the concept. Technically I couldn't do that, but there was a mod I could make to any tech-based weapon - and only weapons - that would convert most if not all the technological components to work with magic instead. That should solve the problem, and allow Sophia to go caping with something more advanced than a crossbow.
And if I could personally modify that weapon to make it literally impossible to kill someone with it, well, that was for me to worry about.
Sophia seemed to weigh that for a moment before seeming to come to a decision as we pushed into the front door of the school, which was fairly bustling with kids as they streamed into the building.
"Come to my room tonight. The principle's office is that way." She stated, gesturing in one direction and walking the opposite way.
I could tell right off that she was trying to be mysterious, which was honestly adorable for how terrible she was at it. I got the distinct impression that in Sophia's head she was basically Batman, despite the fact that she was nowhere near as competent.
Still, I rolled my eyes at her and meandered towards the principles office.
Which is about the point in time it occurred to me that yes, I was going to have to go through middle and high school. Again.
"Fuuuuuuck." I sighed to myself, as I entered the belly of the beast.
I got a quick introduction to the principal - who was way nicer to me than I was expecting from a principal in this setting - followed by the usual bundle of information. I didn't have to worry about a schedule because this was middle school. I had one class and that class moved around to different classrooms as a group between classes. Basically, all I had to do was find someone I found familiar from the first class I was led to, and follow them around like a lost duck until I got a feel for things.
The simplicity of it was soothing to me because I was already pretty stressed out about being in school again. I didn't have problems with most of the actual classes. Middle school was basically when they taught you all the default stuff a sensible person knows - like how clouds work, and how to do long division and all that. As an adult in a child's body I basically just had to apply the tiniest smidgen of attention to what was going on around me to be able to answer questions and look like I was paying attention to class.
I pointedly did not doodle tinker stuff in my notebooks during class, and in general, I just did my utmost to look normal and not stand out. I wasn't a very social person, but I was social enough to deflect most of the people who spoke to me without being rude or making them angry - which was helpful because I quickly learned something important about my cousin.
No one liked Sophia Hess. She was a stonecold bitch to basically everybody. The only reason she was merely ostracized instead of bullied was that people fully expected she'd murder anyone who tried. I pointedly learned this information when the first thing anyone asked me was if my black eye had come from her.
Honestly, it made a lot of sense if I looked at it from the right angle. Sophia had never been popular or well liked. So when Emma came along and suddenly she was top bitch in highschool, she must have loved it. It would have appealed to the part of her she pretended didn't exist that actually wanted people to like her. Shards could mess up a lot about a person, but I doubt they could completely destroy Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Humans needed to be acknowledged. It's just built into us. We can't help it.
Besides snooping on my cousin and doing my best to ignore the fidgeting of my hand as I suppressed my Tinker urges, school was... boring. Mundane, really. I did my best to keep an eye out for any familiar faces - prospective future Wards and the like - but since I mostly knew them by name and not by appearance I didn't have much luck on that front. There was only so much eavesdropping you could do while following around a random redhead to see if his name might be Dennis.
Finally, school ended, and Sophia and I made our way home. I'd describe the lack of conversation that occurred on the way home as 'companionable' but that would be a bald faced lie. The walk was exhaustingly tense, with Sophia doing her best to stay a foot ahead of me no matter how fast we walked. By the time we'd made it home I was out of breath and annoyed. Blessedly, my new body seemed to lack the Asthma and other accompanying allergies my old one had, because if I did have asthma, I might have died a second time trying to make Sophia's ever increasing pace. Worse, the girl had the gal to smile smugly at me as we got to the apartment, like she had just won a contest or something. I glared balefully at her as we rode the elevator up, and had just enough time to sigh in relief as we got inside before Sophia went and derailed my train of thought again.
"We're going out!" She shouted belligerently through her mothers bedroom door, quickly shucking off her backpack, grabbing a glass of water from the kitchen, and then going back outside. The entire thing happened so fast that I still had my shoes on, and I ended up having to leave my backpack in the entryway as Sophia led me back outside and down the elevator.
"Seriously? I've been here like, a day. Give me a break." I sighed in exasperation as she yanked me along behind her like an abusive dog owner.
"You need to run more. Your cardio sucks." She answered in lieu of slowing down or letting me catch my breath. I had the momentary feeling that I might be talking to Bitch instead of Shadow Stalker before she tugged me along again.
I wanna stress, this wasn't a friendly easily misunderstood arm lock. There was no possible way someone could mistake this for anything friendly. Sophia had her hand clamped around my weedy bicep and was practically frog-marching me forward for the first block or so until she got tired and relented.
"Soph, seriously!" I panted, stopping the minute I was no longer being forced forward. She shot me a peeved look but waited for me to catch my breath, eyes scanning the crowd the entire time.
"Where are we even going?" I finally asked once I had finally evened my breathing out.
"Shopping. You have workout clothes? You seem like the type of pussy that wouldn't." She explained liked I was the dumbest person on the planet.
I, being sort of off-kilter from the entire experience, shook my head dumbly at her.
"Come on then." She commanded, breaking out into a light jog. A light jog for her. Sophia was tall and leggy, so her relaxed gait ate up the ground like no ones business. I, on the other hand, was by no means athletic, and so ended up huffing and puffing next to her as she relentlessly drove onward.
Eventually, we ended up in a section of the city that - while not quite abandoned - was definitely not well maintained, and she led me into an alleyway with a big empty dumpster at the end of it.
Then without saying a word, she slipped behind the dumpster. Before I could follow her she came back clutching a backpack I'm almost positive hadn't been behind the dumpster. It was obvious to me that she had probably hidden in inside a wall or something using her power, but I tried to look surprised regardless. I guess it worked because Sophia shot me another 'I am better than you' look before slinging the backpack on and jogging off again.
I stared after her for a second before it occurred to me to follow her. Not because I was surprised by the bag or that she had taken off.
It was because I realized at that moment that she probably intended to jog for this entire fucking outing.
With some exasperation, I sped to catch up with her.
"Where... are we... going..." I gasped out once I caught up with her.
"Lords Market." She shot back instantly. We spent the rest of the run in silence. Mostly because it was all I could do to keep up. When we were a block or so away from the Market, Sophia ducked into an alleyway and unzipped the backpack, which turned out to contain a sizeable mound of hard cash in it. Hesitant for a second, she pull some of it out - maybe a hundred dollars worth of loose bills - then turned towards me.
"Hey, what are you gonna need for the laser thing?" She asked uncertainly. I blinked for a second, then thought about it. Alot of Starfinder tech is basically Magitech. I could comfortably do some pretty interesting stuff with nothing but raw materials, some spools of wire and the tools to engrave some magical circuitry on metal plates. I'd obviously need more advanced facilities and materials later, but for the purposes of the level one stuff I currently had access to, that was good enough.
Of course, that was only if we were talking about the single weapon I had sort of promised I would make for Sophia. It was a completely different story when it came to my own needs. Besides the stuff I had already mentioned, I was going to need a sizeable amount of raw steel to make myself a hardsuit, at least a few decent sized precious gems to get my spellcasting online, and some computer hardware to get myself set up in the long term.
See, I had a plan. I could technically make any item in my level range, but because I didn't have a traditional Starfinder 'class' I was sort of limited in how useful alot of it could be. I really didn't look forward to spending hundreds of dollars on individual gems that would break after I used them to cast a single spell. However, Starfinder had a class called the Technomancer. Technomancer's had this thing called a Spell Core, which was basically a computer they could program spells into. The computer cast the spells for the Technomancer, and basically functioned as that classes equivalent of a spell book. And while it wasn't technically an object you could 'buy' or 'craft' in Starfinder - being itself a Class Feature - it was technically an 'Item', which meant much to my surprise, I could Tinker one up.
That was going to be my in. I might not be able to take class levels in Technomancer, but I could damn well fake it.
I explained as much to Sophia, mostly just listing the materials I would need, and watched her have an aneurysm in real-time as she looked angrily between me and the literal bag of money she was holding. Finally, she growled at me like a feral cat and shoved the entire bag into my chest.
"Get what you need. Nothing else." She ordered.
I raised both eyebrows in surprise at that. I had been very clear on the difference between what I needed for just her gear, and what I needed to myself up and running. I had halfway expected her to refuse me the stuff I needed in favour of just getting her new gun made. She certainly seemed conflicted about it. Which, now that I thought about it, sort of reminded me of the elephant in the room.
"So... I guess you're a cape?" I muttered to her casually as she turned to get back to jogging into the Lords Market. She jerked to a stop as I spoke, spinning around to glare angrily at me.
"How the fuck-" She growled angrily at me. Always angrily with Sophia.
"Soph. You've got a bag of magic money and want me to make you a laser rifle. I'm not stupid." I pointed out tiredly. Honestly, I had no idea how this girl didn't get outed sooner.
Then again, maybe she had. The PRT had to find her somehow in the main timeline.
"...Fuck. Later. Get your fucking shit." She grumbled at me, unable to counter in the face of my impeccable ability to apply common sense to my surroundings.
We quickly scampered into Lords Market after that. It was more of a street market than anything else, so there wasn't much I could get for tinkering here, but I did manage to find a hippy selling quartz crystals for positive vibes or whatever the hell it was that would do okay as zero level spell gems. Besides that, Sophia did eventually bully me into getting workout clothes, and we headed home after visiting half a dozen electronics stores for the rest of what I needed.
Well. Some of what I needed. The amount of metal I'd need for a hardsuit was prohibitively difficult to sneak into an apartment building, but there was enough loose garbage in the area that I had a decent idea of how to resolve that problem. We just had to make sure to spread our purchases out over a wide enough area that we didn't set off any obvious 'thats a tinker' alarms.
Once our shopping was finally done, we made it home just before it got dark out, with Sophia ducking into the apartment first to make sure the living room was clear, before helping me hustle all of our new purchases into her bedroom, where she hid most of it in her closet.
Her closet where her fucking Shadow Stalker costume was just sort of sitting on the floor in a heap.
I stared stupidly at it for a second before turning to her and pointing at it.
"Does that actually work?" I asked incredulously.
"Shut up. Mom doesn't come into my room, and Terry threatened to call the cops the last time-" She clamped her mouth shut glaring balefully at me like I was the one who made her say all that.
"Aight, aight. So. Powers? Come on, I gotta know this shit, or I might fuck up your gun." I wheedled her. At this point I just wanted her to tell me so I could stop pretending not to know already. It added an extra level of complexity and stress to the situation that I could live without.
Sophia gave me a queer look for a second, before rushing over to close the blinds on her window and locking her bedroom door.
Then she used her power, and it was about the creepiest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life.
"I can go through walls and bullets go through me." She explained in a voice that was suddenly weirdly echoey. Her entire body looked like a single undifferentiated mass of wispy darkness, only vaguely in the shape of a person. Then I blinked and she was back to normal, smirking at me.
Honestly, Sophia had been smirking at me a lot today. I'm sure Lisa was somewhere feeling plagiarized right now.
"Electricity fucks me up though." She explained, somewhat ashamed sounding. Yes Sophia, obviously your built-in weakness is something to be ashamed of because you totally had control over it. Jesus christ, this girl.
"Cool. You got a radio or something?" I said after a second, regaining my composure and turning to dig around in the closet for supplies.
"Why?" She asked suddenly sounding defensive.
"Cus this might get a bit loud and some noise to drown it out would be a good idea?" I asked rhetorically, lifting the jewelers kit and a piece of quartz into the air so she could see them.
"Why do you have to do it in my room?" Sophia half whined, reminding me that she was, in fact, a teenage girl and not an unrepentant psychopath.
Currently anyway.
"Cus I share my room with Terry?" I answered again quizzically.
Sophia groaned exaggeratedly at that but finally acquiesced, wandering off to turn her radio on.
With that done, I tucked in to make the beginnings of a laser rifle. A magic laser rifle.
While I did so I ruminated on the topic of my cousin.
Sophia was - despite being extremely abrasive - obviously trying to help me get started, presumably using money she had been stealing from the gangs since her trigger event. Whether that was because she expected something in return or not, it was too soon to tell, but my feel for the situation gave me the impression that - in her own super fucked up way - she was genuinely trying to look out for me. She wasn't just making me run around all day and calling me a pussy because it amused her - although it definitely amused her. She was doing it because she thought I needed to get better at running. She was, in her own bitchy way, trying to help.
I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, family is important. I was glad that most of mine seemed like they cared about me. Terry was obviously doing his best to shield me and Sophia from Gerard, and Sophia was clearly trying to make sure I made out okay in her own way. But that kind of loyalty was infectious. If I spent two years with Sophia and it turned out I couldn't change her enough to stop her from making Taylor trigger... would I be able to cut her out then? Would I be able to look my cousin in the face and declare her unworthy?
I didn't think I could. And that kind of scared me. Because there is nothing worse than knowing someone you care about is wrong and being unwilling to do anything about it.
Grimacing slightly, I refocused on my work, getting all the innards of the weapon ready for when I had the materials to make a case for them. I couldn't do much about the future, not yet.
I wasn't the Gamer. I didn't have a system, a menu, or a bunch of special bullshit just for me that would let me power level my way to godhood in six months flat. It was an entirely arbitrary limit on my tinkering.
It is a special brand of unusual to inflict this and awareness of it upon ones character. I do not know if I should say "Well done" or call you a horrible person. I personally would have, at a minimum, allowed the person to view their character sheet.
And suddenly you have just graduated from being simply unusual directly into 'cruel' territory. Inflicting Coil onto your character with zero means stopping him from taking want he what.
Unless of course, your plan is for your character to become Coil's minion.
Quite liked these introductory chapters. The main character feels like an adult pumped into a kid with the control ect. that implies (does not lets his power control him and such).
Good story BHG. I'm liking the trend of more stories derailing Sophia HWNHDWH mentality (knight of the void being the other).
It's sometimes easy to forget these characters are 14-15 at the start of worm. Almost no one is unreachable at that age - especially if you can change their environment or peers - which is the same technique cults and abusive theocratic parents use mind you. In this, she's even younger. It'll probably be a problem to avoid the bullying completely when she's going to be separated from you in a toxic environment like Winslow.
Unless you test out of middle school and make her want to compete enough to get arcadia grades or something.... that's kind of unlikely though, plans with lots of moving parts are fallible.
Making a working laser rifle out of stuff from a Radioshack, plus whatever I could find around the apartment, was hard.
I don't know who specifically it was that lead me to believe that this kind of project was something I could complete in a single day, especially under adverse conditions, but they were absolutely wrong.
Also, Radioshack still existed in this nightmare world. It doesn't get more bleak than that.
My first two projects were things I tried to work on in tandem.
For one, as much as I generalized the weapon I was making for Sophia as a laser rifle, the finished product wouldn't actually be a rifle. It would be a pistol.
I had judged long ago that giving Sophia fucking Hess a weapon more lethal than a mundane crossbow was a bad freaking idea. I had never, at any point, considered the idea seriously. Instead, what I was trying to build was a little something called a Mercy Pistol. I could wax poetic about the lore and significance of the damn thing to the religion it originated from in the Starfinder universe - but none of that actually matters so I won't.
The Mercy Pistol and all its higher level variants fired beams of light that technically did fire damage. So in that sense, they were absolutely freaking lasers. The flip side to this, was that the beams a Mercy Pistol fired not only didn't, but couldn't cause lasting damage. Getting hit by one would feel exactly as bad getting shot at by a normal, lethal laser weapon, but instead of dying from a massive cauterized hole in your chest, you just sort of blacked out.
Hence, Mercy. 'Cus they chose not to kill you.
In my esteemed opinion, the Mercy Pistol was basically the perfect weapon for Sophia. It was obnoxiously dangerous, caused extreme pain to her targets, and prevented her from going to juvie on murder charges. Sure, there was probably something in the geneva convention somewhere about weapons like that, but given what I knew of Sophia's possible future, I'd take what I could get.
Plus you know, making literal Nazi's feel like they were burning alive tickled a part of my hindbrain that I found pleasing.
Note to self, try to find out if the Geneva Convention exists here.
The second project I was working on was my Spell Core. Technically, this entire build process would go alot faster if I made the Spell Core first, then used all the accompanying casting capability that came with it, to make Sophia's weapon.
The thing was, I had asked Sophia to show me the ropes as it were, and she had in turn chosen to abstain from doing anything Cape-y until such a time as she had her new weapon in hand. Sophia, for all her issues, was amazingly competent at navigating the city and beating the shit out of people. I wasn't so narcissistic as to think I could easily match her in that field jusy because I was mentally older.
So, instead Soph ended up dedicating the time she would otherwise have spent working her aggression out on Nazi's, by helping me with my physical conditioning.
So yes, I had spent the last two weeks being run up and down the neighborhood like a god damn dog. Sophia was fairly merciless about it too. She didn't do 'breaks'. She also didn't let me escape her either. I had fucking tried. When school let out, she would find me, and make us run home. When we got there, she would make us run up the stairs - too the top of the fucking building. We lived on the second god damn floor.
Apparently she considered the walk back down the stairs - yes, still no elevator - a good cooldown excercise.
So yes, I was doing my best to hustle out the woman's god damn laser pistol. I think I might literally die if she woke me up at five am to go sprinting around the block like a madman one more time.
Honestly, while it was interesting to see the ridiculous process that lead to Sophia being such a capable fighter, despite not having a power particularly well suited to melee, it was the exact opposite of fun to have it take up nearly all my free time.
That was literally my life now. If I wasn't at school I was running, or doing push ups, or squats or whatever. If I wasn't doing either of those things, I was groggily trying to engrave spell matrices on the crap quality quartz I'd gotten from the market. See, I had chosen to bypass my material concerns with a nifty little spell called Fabricate Scrap.
Fabricate Scrap was a Zero Level spell, which were the only spells I could cram into a spell gem currently, and served the sole and simple purpose of turning roughly ten pounds of any inert material - I had been using garbage bags scavenged from the compactor room in the apartment - into a equivalent weight in scrap. Scrap electronics. Scrap metal. Etc etc.
The rules for the spell were such that the stuff was described as being useless for the purposes of building anything with, but I didn't need the stuff for parts. All the internals of my gear were being put together by me separately wherever possible. No, I just needed a way to get ahold of spare metal without visibly spending any time doing the incredibly obvious action of scavenging scrap metal from around the city.
Honestly, it was no small wonder that Tinkers were so rare in Brockton. They probably all got murdered within weeks of triggering.
My home life for the last couple of weeks had been somewhat less than ideal. Gerard hadn't beaten me again, but he clearly didn't much care for me either. We didn't really talk to one another, and that was just fine by me. I'm not really one to casually consider murder, but the concept of an adult man beating the shit out of a child for really any reason had my power supplying me with all kinds of interesting ways to do just that.
I only found out later from Terry that he had backed off because Auntie had explained that they were getting paid from a fund my parents had setup to look after me.
A fund that they wouldnt be getting anything from, if a social worker had occasion to take me away from them.
While the knowledge that I could screw Gerard with a phone call was nice, I wasn't willing to be separated from the Hess siblings quite yet - so Gerard and I defaulted to a sort of cold war state. Auntie tried to paper over it, mostly by pretending nothing had happened despite the fact that my black eye had only just finished healing recently. She seemed like she wanted to take care of me, but was much too invested in whatever she had going on with Gerard to tank it for a kid that wasn't even her own.
Terry was aloof most of the time. He looked out for me and Sophia when he was around, but he mostly did that by directing Gerards ire towards himself whenever he looked like he was going to get violent. He didn't really try to be my friend or anything. It wasn't the most comfortable feeling to know my older cousin was perfectly willing to get beaten for me, but didn't particulalry care to talk to me. Still, looking back on things, I can't recall being super friendly with anyone nearly five years younger than me when I was that age either.
Sophia... spent nearly every waking moment breathing down my fucking neck. I think she might have started to doubt my credentials as a Tinker even, until the first time I had transmuted garbage into scrap metal. After that, she was still breathing down my neck about wasting time and excercising, but it was mostly in an anticipatory fashion. It was kind of scary watching her frustrations rise as she continually abstained from going on patrol to train me. It was like watching her Shard manipulate her in real time. I would liken it to the way someone trying to quit smoking can get progressively more grouchy, only it was so, so much worse than that.
See, as we had gotten closer, Sophia had deigned to hang around me in our free time at school, mostly during lunch times. I wouldn't mind that, except that where she had started out sullenly eating lunch near me and ignoring anyone who chose to talk to me during that time, she had slowly shifted to making angry jabs at anyone who came within ten feet of us.
At this point no one even tried anymore.
Mind you, that worked fine for me. Sophia's inherent bitchiness was the perfect excuse not to have to pretend to be a vapid teenager. But it was still quite concerning.
Which brings me to now. Two weeks and change later, I had finally, finally, finished both my builds. The Mercy Pistol - which looked janky as hell until I gave it a cheap black paint job to cover up the crap materials it was made out of - rested carefully at the bottom of Sophia's backpack, and my Spell Core was wrapped around my left forearm.
There were a lot of forms a Spell Core could take, but at the heart of it, a Spell Core was an advanced computer that worked by connecting a bunch of spell crystals together into a functioning set of hardware. The crystals shared the load of casting the spell, allowing them to cast without shattering like a normal Spell Gem did.
As a result, a Spell Core didn't really look like a traditional computer. Mine, for instance, was a spiralling loop of coppery metal inset with just over a dozen hunks of quartz. It was the worlds most hideous bracer. I didn't love it, and wanted to replace it with something better as soon as possible, but for my purposes it was good enough.
Currently, Sophia and I were on our way to what she affectionately referred to as her hideout. Once more harkening back to her desperate need to be a batman wannabe, she seemed inordinately proud to show me the place, even though it just turned out to be an empty fish packaging plant. It was big, I guess, at least.
We headed around the rear of the building, where Sophia ghosted through the wall while I was left outside to wait. She had apparently long since barricaded the doors from the inside, making it all but impossible to get into the plant without her powers. Now she had to go about the arduous task of moving all of that crap out of the way to let me in.
While she did that, I had to resist the urge to fiddle with my brand new magical supercomputer in public.
Spells were, unfortunately, something I had to craft. The Spell Core didn't just come with a bunch of them preloaded. From a certain point of view, each spell I could cast was basically an App for the thing. Since I had spent almost all of my time just building the device, I hadn't had altogether too much time to program anything into it. Fabricate Scrap was in there, since it was the spell I had arguably used the most at this point, along with Energy Ray - which I had been forced to figure out so I could accomplish some welding - and Junk Armor. Junk Armor was the sole combat spell I had added after the fact, mostly because I had long since realized that I was going to end up going on patrol with Soph, and probably wouldn't have time to build a hardsuit before then.
Junk Armor did one thing, and one thing only. It grabbed whatever was around, and flash warped it into armor for me to wear. That armor would contain the basic amenities required in space - cheap environmental protections mostly - and was otherwise not ideal as far as armor went. It lasted for twenty four hours, and that was about it. Basically, it was Mush's power on a much smaller scale.
It was a stop gap and nothing more, but it was a stopgap I was going to need.
I still had room in my current Spell Core for a few more spells, but I would have to program those spells first, which was a pain.
I found myself drawn from my musings by the sound of the door to the building opening behind me, a sweaty Sophia glaring at me for having the audacity to be relaxed when she was working.
"Hurry the fuck up, I don't want anyone to see the door is open." She bit out at me, grabbing me by the arm and yanking me into the building.
It was... well it was a fish processing plant. There were conveyors all over the place, a bunch of overhead walkways that no doubt served some alien purpose known only to the fishing industry, and a host of large vats throughout the open floorspace.
There was a distinct lack of functioning machines I noticed, which made sense if the company was trying to cut its losses and moved them elsewhere when the cities economy collapsed.
Not a lot of need for a fish packaging plant when there were no fish being uh.. fished.
I could see a couple places where Sophia had added things to the place, most notably a bunch of ropes hanging from the overhead walkways with pieces of paper attached to them as targets.
"Does this thing have a safety?" Sophia asked me, distracting me from my examination of the room.
I was going to say 'no', followed by a short moment to berate myself for not putting a safety on a fucking laser pistol, but Sophia chose that moment to swiftly raise and fire the Mercy Pistol at one of the hanging paper targets.
There was no sound as the weapon discharged. No telltale blaster fire noise like from Star Wars. Just a brilliant lance of white light that was there and then gone in the blink of an eye. It would probably be extremely disorienting at night time.
"Must have missed." She muttered, eyeing one of the paper targets and then taking aim again.
"Christ Soph, why? I already told you, that thing can literally only hurt people. It wouldn't leave a mark on those targets." I explained for the umpteenth time.
Again, I have no idea how that worked, but it did, and I wasn't going to mess with it.
Sophia, charming gal she was, decided ignore my staement, instead walking out to the middle of the cleared floor space so she could keep practicing anyway.
Say what you want about her, but she's dedicated.
She also clearly had no idea how to hold or fire a pistol, particularly one that lacked recoil.
Grouchily - I'd been getting maybe four hours of sleep a night for weeks now - I walked over to her to explain what she needed to know, before starting up my own preparations.
As much as I had been using Energy Ray to spot weld stuff, its actual purpose was as an attack. Not a particularly strong attack - its damage in the rulebook would be about half as much as Sophia's pistol - but it was the only attack I had.
Carefully, I tapped a sequence out on my wrist, then watched as my Spell Core lit up. Complex equations filled my mind as the Core came online, and I mentally prodded the part of the equation that dictated what flavour of damage the ray would come out as. Ice was the easiest, and least likely to blow something up by mistake, so that was what I went with.
Then I pointed a finger at one od the targets, and cheered when a frigid ray of ice froze the thing solid.
"Fuck yes!" I yelled in glee. I had beem working on this stuff for so long that the sheer joy of being able to shoot lasers from my hands hadn't set in until I actually fired one. Suddenly reinvigorated, I quickly checked over the Core for damage. A zero level spell shluldn't tax the thing at all, but I still took the time to check all the gems set in it for fractures or damage.
When I found none, I looked back up with a feral grin, and joined Sophia in unleashing unholy hell on those little paper targets.
Surprisingly, since we were sharing the same targets, we found that we did have a way to judge if Sophia's attacks were landing. The heat from the Mercy Pistol's beam was apparently enough to melt the ice my own attacks left on our targets, leaving soggy ripped paper in its aftermath.
This allowed us to quickly fall into a rhythm as Sophia worked her way through all the ammo I had designated for practice. The Mercy Pistol literally ran on batteries, so I had Tinkered up three power packs Sophia could rotate through while the other two charged. Not that we could charge anything here. I don't think the building had any electricity.
"Hey Soph?" I asked tentatively while we were on our seventh round of freeze-defrost-replace for the targets.
"What?" She asked, her tone surprisingly light. I guess she was in a good mood.
"Why don't you join the Wards?" I asked tentatively, wincing even as the words left my mouth.
Counter to my expectations, and possibly because of the aforementioned good mood, Sophia looked like she had to think about it for a second before answering.
"They don't do anything." She stated flatly. She wasn't angry about it - probably because she hadn't been subject to the PRT's whims yet. It was just a statement of pure fact.
"That seems unlikely. They've got the resources and manpower to be pretty effective. It is kind of their job." I pointed out, trying for devils advocate.
I, of course, knew that the Wards were a useless PR stunt. At least in this city. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think Sophia could benefit from meeting the other Wards on better terms.
"Have you seen one patrol in our neighborhood since we got here?" She asked rhetorically, a sneer on her face.
I thought about it, then answered.
"No, but it's a big city." I pointed out.
"It ain't that big. I used to be able to go downstairs at ten oclock sharp and be able to find a half dozen drug dealers within a block of the apartment." She explained, getting up from where she had been waiting for me to finish my turn and taking a firing stance that was noticeably better than when we had started.
"Used to?" I asked, already knowing the answer to my question.
"Yeah." Sophia stated with a vicious grin on her face, rapidly plugging targets like she'd been doing this her whole life.
"Used to." She affirmed.
Well. That wasn't chilling at all.
Still, the conversation and mutual blasting session seemed to have sort of thawed something in Sophia. She seemed alot more open to casual conversation than she had been before. I wouldn't say she trusted me really - it had only been two weeks after all - but the seeds of it were there.
We spent some more time chatting, mostly about the local villains, but occasionally about other things like TV shows or music, then packed up and headed home when it got too dark to see inside the factory.
I looked down at my Spell Core, hidden beneath my sweater sleeve, then at my cousin in one of her rare good moods, and smiled.
I don't know anithing about Starfinder but just by the Spacial ci-fi seting i like to think the 0-1 level technology of a Spacewar capable civilization is about Armsmaster have trouble comprending it dificult so you have a work arround or when he reach 5-7 level technology he will be prety much S level threat? And we are asuming he have a shard but he actualy do? If not he do have reproducible tech?
Shit! I have not thinking of that, a gun she can use to painful reduce the target without risk of killing? Grue goin to second triggered in a week tops.
Spelljammer, while not the exact same, served as enough inspiration for Starfinder that that name might be more recognizable to more old timey D&D players
Do you know the absolute worst thing about this shitty setting? It wasn't the Endbringers, or the looming end of civilization, or the roaming bands of murder hobos-
No wait, it was definitively the murder hobos. Not because they were horrific monsters that left a trail of misery and death in their wake so unfathomable that on this world it was orders of magnitude more distressing than the holocaust - although that did suck. No, it was the fact that they had handily laid claim to the title of 'Murder Hobo'.
I literally had powers based on Dungeons & Dragons. My power had a rough approximation of a leveling system. 'Murder Hobo' was my go-to Cape name. But because of Jack freaking Slash, under no circumstances could I actually use it, which was frustrating.
A light swat to the back of my head reminded me of where I was and what I was doing.
"Pay attention. You see anything?" Sophia asked me from where she was crouched on the rooftop next to me.
It had been two days since we had gone to the fish packaging plant for target practice the first time. We had gone back for more practice after that, and, at my insistence, to make sure that the Mercy Pistol didn't interfere in some way with Sophia's shadow form.
It didn't, and in fact, the nonlethal properties of the gun combined with Sophia's phasing resulted in a really interesting effect.
The beams from the weapon looked like they phased with her. So instead of stopping at the first solid object the beam hit, the white lance of pure pain appeared to continue on for the entire twenty-foot range it was designed to be effective at.
But John, you might ask, if the beam phases, does it still hurt people?
I'm glad you asked John! You see, I was wondering pretty much the exact same thing, and, knowing the weapon literally couldn't maim me, had opted to test it by stick my hand behind a paper target and letting Soph shoot at it.
On a completely unrelated note, some of the side effects of feeling like your hand has just been blown to pieces include, pissing yourself, screaming like a banshee, and blacking out from the pain.
That one experience was nearly enough to make me rethink my stance on using the gun at all - until I remembered that I was a black dude in a city full of Nazis. Then I just reminded myself that Police Officers back home have to let themselves be tased and pepper sprayed once each before graduating from the academy, so they know what it feels like. This was... kind of like that. Right? Right.
"Nope," I replied, covering my nervousness and anxiety over being three stories straight up, in a suit of coppery armor made of literal garbage, looking for thugs - who would probably have guns - to fight. This was my first patrol, and I had to consciously not think about the fact that, statistically, it was likely to be my last.
Sophia grumbled at that but quickly returned to scouting the area around us while I continued my slow and ponderous way across the rooftops along the route she had prescribed for us.
I eyed the lip of the rooftop in front of me, resisting the urge to lift my balaclava to scratch my ear. It wasn't honestly a very wide gap to the next building. It was four or five feet tops, with a slight drop onto the shorter building across from me. On a normal day, I'd feel totally confident making that jump. It was the equivalent of leaping from the curb to the opposite side of the sidewalk. Just... if the sidewalk was a thirty-foot drop to the street below. I knew I was being a baby about this. I had made similar jumps to this multiple times to get to where I was currently standing. But it still scared the shit out of me every time. Taking a deep breath I stepped back to give myself a run-up, then sprinted at the ledge of the rooftop, jumping at the last second and landing with somewhat loud clunking noise as my Armor - which was made entirely of metal - slapped into the rooftop.
Junk Armor was weird. There was a lot about it that the game rules either left vague or didn't fully explain. For one, the aforementioned fact that the armor was entirely made of metal. I had actually had to shuck the entire thing off when I first cast the spell because it had started to immediately pinch and poke at me through the t-shirt and shorts I had been wearing at the time. Consequently, the underside of my 'costume' was a thick sweatshirt and sweatpants layered on top of a t-shirt and shorts. It was hot as hell to wear, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that the armor should be able to take a few bullets, which was all I wanted out of the thing.
That was the second thing about Junk Armor that threw me off. It was Power Armor but it also wasn't. By some esoteric process that even my Tinker power couldn't fully explain, Junk Armor somehow managed to have exactly enough electronics and support to mitigate its own weight without increasing my strength in any way whatsoever. This was the only reason I could feasibly make a jump like the one I had just made while simultaneously being weighed down by twenty pounds of metal.
Inwardly, I silently prayed for the day I could make actual Power Armor, before sighing and standing up from the crouch I had landed in. As silently as someone wearing as much armor as I was could manage, I crept to the edge of the rooftop to scan the streets nearby.
I had the feeling that this method of patrolling wasn't likely to be very effective for me. Sophia's power made her a perfect ambush fighter. Her mass changed when she used her power, so she could take a flying leap, become intangible, and sail meters in any given direction before landing silently, which meant she could cover huge swathes of land traveling by rooftop. I, on the other hand, was limited to a fairly slow pace that I could tell was irritating the girl, who felt compelled to stay close enough that I could see her on a rooftop several buildings away, but who was constantly ranging around me like a hungry animal.
Five more buildings and two more check-ins with Sophia later I was ready to call it quits.
"This isn't working," I told her eventually, stopping her from turning to sprint away from me the second I had reported seeing nothing again.
"You just need to move faster." She told me with barely restrained anger.
"I'm trying. I don't think roof hopping like this is going to work for me until I can build myself a jetpack or something." I continued, reaching out to grab her shoulder so she wouldn't end the conversation by walking away.
"Then go home." Sophia hissed at me with more venom than I was expecting. Jesus this girl had a serious hard-on for beating the shit out of gangsters.
"No, listen. I'm not going to pussy out on you. I'm just thinking we change it up. Look, what I just take the sidewalk at a jog and you can shadow me up above. We'll make better time, and I can be like, a distraction. If we find something everyone will focus on me so you can line up a shot on them." I offered, even as Sophia used her power to escape my grip.
"...Fine." She grumbled eventually after considering the plan for a minute.
And thank god for that. I had only managed to get one more spell into my Spell Core since yesterday. The spell was called 'Flight' and could be cast at a variety of levels. Contrary to what you might expect from a spell literally called Flight, it did not allow me to fly. Yet. At first level the Flight spell basically just made you fall slowly. I had learned it explicitly for today, knowing that I was going to end up on a rooftop at some point, and wanting to have insurance against falling to my death. The problem was, Flight was a first-level spell. My Spell Core could handle casting exactly two different first-level spells in a day before I had to let it cool down. If I pushed past that point the crystals that made up the CPU for the thing would shatter at best, and explode at worst. First-level spells were an order of magnitude more power-intensive than Zero level ones, which was why I could cast a functionally infinite number of Zero level ones, but only the two First level ones. I could improve that limit by upgrading the Core, but because of the stupid level limitations my power had imposed on me, I wouldn't be able to address that for a while.
Since I had cast Junk Armor before leaving on this patrol - another First-level spell - I had one more available spell to cast, which I promptly used to cast Flight, then stepped bodily over the edge of the rooftop.
"Shit!" Sophia yelled above me suddenly, trying and failing to lurch forward and grab me before I could jump. I ended up staring stupidly up at her as I drifted to the ground, eventually touching down with a gentle metallic 'tink'.
"My bad, shoulda warned you. I can only do that once so..." I opened up before my cousin pointed an angry finger at me.
"Shut up. Let's go!" She yelled down at me with all the fury of an embarrassed teenager.
I have never in my life encountered someone so angry about caring about another human being. It honestly boggled my mind how Sophia could switch from being worried about me to acting like she wanted to strangle me for breathing her air.
Rolling my eyes at her antics, I turned in the direction we had originally been traveling and started jogging onward. I wasn't as fast as Sophia normally, but the added benefit of not needing to navigate the rooftops gave me enough of a speed advantage to keep pace with her. Not that I could easily tell she was even there. Her black outfit was basically invisible against the backdrop of the night sky, and her shadow form doubled down on that near-invisibility when she was jumping from building to building. I only had the barest hint that she was present because I knew what to look for, and knew she wouldn't just leave me for no reason.
Our pace picked up considerably after that, and maybe twenty minutes later, wonder of wonders, we actually found some crime to stop.
A little-known fact about Brockton Bay. There were areas of the city where neither the Nazis, the Asian Bad Boys nor the Merchants held territory. When I first got here, I was under the distinct impression that was untrue. I had assumed - wrongfully - that if turf wasn't claimed by the gangs, it was claimed by the PRT - who might as well be a gang.
I guess it made sense though. Since the two biggest gangs in the city were essentially racist hate groups, the cities sizable, non-Asian, ethnic population had to live somewhere. That 'somewhere' existed as pockets of space that ringed, but were not directly part of, what you could loosely consider PRT turf - which was really just the gated communities for rich people and what few economic centers the city had left after the riots that created the boat graveyard. Like peasants huddling outside the castle walls for safety, areas like the one me and Sophia lived in could theoretically expect law enforcement and cape support if something happened.
In practice, not so much.
The crime in question was actually sort of disappointing. For very obvious reasons, I had a mental image of what my first night out would be like. There would be Nazis everywhere, a damsel in distress, and all that good stuff. Then after I had saved the day, she'd ask me who I was and I would proudly proclaim 'I don't know'.
I deflated as I watched the three shit heads with nothing better to do with their time, scream at the cashier for the gas station in front of me. The fact that none of them had noticed me lumbering up to place in the dead of night was a testament to their incompetence.
That or they were too high to think straight. I guess the Merchants did exist, even if they weren't particularly threatening prior to Leviathan making all their Mad Max dreams come true.
Gesturing up at the rooftops across the street, I made sure to get Sophia's attention before gesturing at what was going on in the gas station.
I had hidden behind one of the gas pumps when it became obvious no one had noticed me yet and waited patiently for Sophia to alight next to me at the end of a long jump from the opposite end of the building. Nervous anticipation building inside of me the whole while.
"What's the plan? One of them has a gun pointed at the cashier so-" I started, ducking my head out from around cover to check the situation only to return and find Sophia gone.
Here's an important thing to understand about me. I had D&D powers. From my point of view, I could handily break down most Parahuman abilities and situations into scenarios that fit handily into my understanding of that game. On an intellectual level, I had a firm grasp of things like maintaining tactical advantage, flanking, sneak attacks, and the like.
But in D&D, when the fight starts, you get to look around at your friends and spend twenty minutes coming up with a plan before you do anything in the game. You aren't supposed to. But I have yet to encounter a group that actually used a six-second timer to limit out-of-character planning.
So I hadn't actually been expecting to talk for twenty minutes about what to do next, but thirty seconds might have been nice.
Whipping my head around again, I saw Sophia had sprinted past me to come down in a crouch just outside the gas station, shadow form activated and pistol raised, pointing straight at two of the three bad guys through the glass facade of the building.
I knew what was going to happen next, but seeing it still nearly made my jaw drop when she pulled the trigger and the beam from the Mercy Pistol went straight through the wall and both men, sending them sprawling to the ground wracked with pain.
Shaking my head groggily, I dashed forward to help just in time for Sophia to ghost through the wall, descending on the two moaning thugs she had taken out with two more blasts from her gun, even as the third cussed and sprinted out the front door.
Right into me.
I want to say he ran 'right into my fist' because rearing back to punch the guy would have been the obvious solution to this problem. Unfortunately, in my mind, I was a Wizard, which meant the mere idea of a melee attack felt inefficient and stupid to me.
Jokes on me though, because I and the thug went sprawling in a heap that I was not prepared for.
Evidently, he was, or at least, was panicked enough to fake it, because before I could do much more than cuss and start trying to get back up, he had rolled to his feet, pulled a pistol on me, and plugged me straight in the chest.
It fucking hurt. My armor stopped me from immediately dying, but the kinetic energy from the shot had to go somewhere which meant that it still felt like I had been kicked in the chest by a mule. I had no doubt that I was going to have a huge bruise there tomorrow.
More importantly, I went from being as clinical as could be about the situation to apocalyptically mad in two seconds flat.
This piece of shit had just tried to kill me.
Me!
I barely even considered what happened next. My Spell Core was already warmed up, so with utmost ease, I plugged the dude in the face with an Elemental Ray set for ice damage.
In retrospect, flash freezing someone's face might have been an overreaction.
I stared in horror as the dude not only immediately stopped moving but screamed wordlessly as part of his upper lip just sort of broke off. Like a chipped tooth. It was grotesque and despite my nascent anger at being nearly killed I quickly rushed forward - careful to kick the gun the guy had dropped away - to try to do... something. Anything really. The problem was, I didn't have a way to melt the frost without killing the guy with a ray of fire.
I mean. I did but...
"Shadow Stalker!" I yelled for Sophia, waving her away from the men she was swiftly zip-tying to the ground.
"What?" She asked sharply, no doubt responding to the panic in my voice.
"I fucked up. I need you to melt the ice on this guy's face with your gun." I quickly explained, gesturing wildly behind me at the downed criminal.
She didn't even think twice about it. Shit, she didn't even take a closer look. One second I was explaining, the next she had turned wispy and blasted the guy in the head with her fucking pain gun.
I gulped. I loved my cousin, but holy shit was she stone-cold sometimes. More so than that, I was having serious regrets about putting that kind of firepower in her hands. She seemed entirely too gleeful about its use.
"Uh..." I uttered dumbly, before shaking off the sensation of confusion and turning to look at the cashier.
"You should... call the cops, maybe?" I offered lamely, waving my hand around the area. The cash guy looked at me like I was an idiot, but nodded his head and did so anyway.
No use antagonizing a random cape I guess.
Turning back to Sophia I realized... that she was gone. Again.
Irked, I left the gas station, jogging a ways out while scanning the rooftops for Sophia. Once I was maybe a block away, I stopped in an alleyway.
In the heat of the moment I had just sort of responded but in retrospect-
Holy shit I nearly died. I nearly died, and horrifically maimed that guy. No freaking wonder Sophia got booked for excessive force, I barely even had to try to mess that guy up.
Breathing heavily I scrambled to get the lower half of my mask up just in time to vomit on the ground in front of me. I was shaking. Why the hell was I shaking? I wasn't cold or anything so-
"Give it a minute." Sophia's voice echoed behind me.
I jerked slightly in surprise, turning around and wiping my mouth with one hand.
"It doesn't last that long the first time." She told me awkwardly, shrugging at me from under her jury-rigged cloak and hockey mask.
"That dude's face-" I started, trying to explain why that was so terrible, but she cut me off.
"Fuck him. He fucking shot you." She growled at me in sudden irritation.
"But-" I stammered out.
"Drink." She ordered, cutting me off and holding a bottle of water from the gas station out towards me. I stared at it suspiciously.
"Did you pay for that?" I asked.
"Yes. Drink." She ordered me again.
I scowled at her but acquiesced, snagging the bottle from her and drinking deeply from it.
Of course, I then vomited it back up nearly immediately.
We stayed silently in the alley for a few more minutes, idly watching as a police cruiser finally went blaring past in the direction we had come from.
"Thanks," I stated tiredly when I finally started to feel less nauseous.
No answer came, so I turned to look at my cousin only to find her gone again.
Holy shit, she's actually going to keep pulling that Batman shit on me. Is this what Robin felt like until I figured out the trick for himself? This sucked.
...am I a sidekick?
No. No way. I was way too powerful to be a sidekick. Right? Right.
"Wait up!" I yelled up at the rooftops, catching the fluttering edge of Sophia's cape, and chasing after her, deep into the night.
