Her ring of invisibility is CL3, sustenance is CL5. Not much difference, but enough I guess.
Story of an industrious Tinker
- Thread starter Haaret
- Start date
- Location
- New Zealand
This was a lovely chapter. I'm not at all familiar with D&D, but I assume that the new metal she created is Adamantium?
PrognosticHannya
Far Too Enthusiastic About Etymology
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't think so, it's mentioned that the metal has characteristic ripples in it, and I don't think
- Location
- Australia
While the fact you are doing all these Jewish things is great as I know nothing about it. The fact they are in I'm guessing Hebrew? I have no clue what any of it says so I just skip them. If you could have a translation to English at the end it would be awesome.
Dragonmaster150
Firstborn of Dragonkind
- Location
- Dragendolan: Land of the Dragon Kings
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Another great chapter. Nice to see that the MC get's to see the consequences of her actions the night before. I like that it was done in a much more personal way than most other stories. Usually we get a PHO interlude with the bay talking about the MC's actions, but here the fact that she saved Sarah's step-dad has an actual impact on her own circle of friends.
On another note, I'm just waiting for the moment when her cousin is going to randomly walk into the workshop while she's distilling mithril by complete accident. (Or when she's setting up the ingredients for distillation since she does seem to do that during the day when any member of her family can walk in through the door.)
Also, I know a few people have mentioned it, but the majority of us readers don't actually speak Hebrew. While I would prefer if you continued writing the chapters as they are, it would be nice if you had a short section at the end, probably in a spoiler, with the translation in english.
Thank you once again for the awesome words!
On another note, I'm just waiting for the moment when her cousin is going to randomly walk into the workshop while she's distilling mithril by complete accident. (Or when she's setting up the ingredients for distillation since she does seem to do that during the day when any member of her family can walk in through the door.)
Also, I know a few people have mentioned it, but the majority of us readers don't actually speak Hebrew. While I would prefer if you continued writing the chapters as they are, it would be nice if you had a short section at the end, probably in a spoiler, with the translation in english.
Thank you once again for the awesome words!
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- Location
- usa
Adamantine, or perhaps Starmetel? If materials prove to be easier then the CL requirement of full magic items there's some good stuff out there. There's one metel, tho I forget the name that has twice the hardness of adamantine.
Don't know if it has the same "ignore hardness less then it" property adamantine has tho.I think I remember reading about a dwarf method of increasing an object's hardness without enchanting.
I also wonder if she can recreate things like dark or ironwood, I always assumed warforged were made with a combination of living iron and greenwood, I'll be honest tho, no idea about the stonework
Don't know if it has the same "ignore hardness less then it" property adamantine has tho.I think I remember reading about a dwarf method of increasing an object's hardness without enchanting.
I also wonder if she can recreate things like dark or ironwood, I always assumed warforged were made with a combination of living iron and greenwood, I'll be honest tho, no idea about the stonework
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- Location
- Israel
Here I'll translate the Kiddush (Sanctification) lines for you: [Baruch ata Adonai], [Eloheinu Melech ha-olam], [asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav vitzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat].
[Blessed you our god], [The king(ruler?) of the world], Who sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us to light the candle of Shabbat\Saturday.]
For those that aren't intimate with Jewish practices, Shabbat\Saturday is the holy day of rest as it is the last day of the week, supposed to rest on that day in remembrance and reverence of God who rested on the 7th day of creation (Genesis book from the Tanach\Old Testament).
The reason you're supposed to light a candle is because that on the day of rest working is forbidden unless it's to save life or of critical requirement and cannot be left unattended. And at the time that commandment was written lighting fire was considered labor, so the explanation of the commandment expanded into "creating a spark" and so it was only allowed to transfer the flames from one place to another as it is much easier than lighting one from scratch which could take half an hour of work to get a good fire going.
This commandment is kind of silly in modern times when you consider that the orthodoxy prevents ALL usage of continuously active circuits during Shabbat as well. A computer never creates a new spark when you use it, it always has low power running through it and your usage simply redirects it somewhere else. But this is getting into my personal gripes so if anyone wants to argue about jewish things with an atheist that came from a family mixed with Orthodox, standard and 'alternative' Religious jews I'll be happy to talk in private.
Just remember that while I am not butthurt about being accidentally or misconceptually insulted you should still keep minimum amount of respect.
[Blessed you our god], [The king(ruler?) of the world], Who sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us to light the candle of Shabbat\Saturday.]
For those that aren't intimate with Jewish practices, Shabbat\Saturday is the holy day of rest as it is the last day of the week, supposed to rest on that day in remembrance and reverence of God who rested on the 7th day of creation (Genesis book from the Tanach\Old Testament).
The reason you're supposed to light a candle is because that on the day of rest working is forbidden unless it's to save life or of critical requirement and cannot be left unattended. And at the time that commandment was written lighting fire was considered labor, so the explanation of the commandment expanded into "creating a spark" and so it was only allowed to transfer the flames from one place to another as it is much easier than lighting one from scratch which could take half an hour of work to get a good fire going.
This commandment is kind of silly in modern times when you consider that the orthodoxy prevents ALL usage of continuously active circuits during Shabbat as well. A computer never creates a new spark when you use it, it always has low power running through it and your usage simply redirects it somewhere else. But this is getting into my personal gripes so if anyone wants to argue about jewish things with an atheist that came from a family mixed with Orthodox, standard and 'alternative' Religious jews I'll be happy to talk in private.
Just remember that while I am not butthurt about being accidentally or misconceptually insulted you should still keep minimum amount of respect.
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- Location
- Brazil
Adamantine, get!
Honestly, an Adamantine knife is a massively useful tool all on its own. Much like Wolverine goes snicker snack and can just cut through things like paper, even as he doesn't have super strength, so can anyone wielding an Adamantine blade.
The simple fact that her stuff is stable means she'd be a real game changer if she had the resources to churn stuff out on industrial batches. The metals alone could probably revolutionize tinkering.
Honestly, an Adamantine knife is a massively useful tool all on its own. Much like Wolverine goes snicker snack and can just cut through things like paper, even as he doesn't have super strength, so can anyone wielding an Adamantine blade.
The simple fact that her stuff is stable means she'd be a real game changer if she had the resources to churn stuff out on industrial batches. The metals alone could probably revolutionize tinkering.
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it is indeed adamantine
the ripples are from using imperfect equipment to make it, a home chemistry set is not the ideal here.
I really appreciate you taking time to tell me what you enjoyed about the chapter, thankyou!
Her family know she has gotten into chemistry, her aunt gave her that leather apron, they just don't know what she is doing with it. they are more of the opinion that she can't get into too much trouble with a home chemistry set, mostly because none of them have looked into exactly how much trouble you can get into with just a home chemistry set.
starmetal is a fun one, but sadly not something she has created, she would probably need an actual meteorite to make it. So she isn't likely to go green star adept anytime soon.
she could make dark or ironwood, theoretically. She actually has a harder time sourcing wood and wood working tools without adult supervision than she does the chemicals she needs to make Mithril and adamantine
as for the Hebrew stuff, I'm going to put a glossary in a spoiler section at the end of the last chapter of everything that has come up so far in the fic, if I reference more later i will update it and put it on the end of the relevant chapters.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm enjoying the story so far. The tinkering system is unique and I'm enjoying seeing a Jewish character. I'm enjoying seeing more of the culture. The grammar is generally good, however, double check your apostrophe use. You are using apostrophes on plural words that aren't possessive often. For instance, in this sentence "Twin's" shouldn't have an apostrophe.
Interlude - Batavian Tears
Ethan hated waking up in the mornings, the familiar feelings of grogginess as he swam closer to consciousness brought with them painful memories. Struggling in his bed to escape from the tangle of covers he had cocooned himself in during the night he fought his way to a sitting position. Wiping the sweat off his brow with the towel he had hung over one of the bed posts he twisted around, settling his feet on the hardwood floor of his bedroom. The familiar feeling of the varnished floor beneath his bare toes helped ease him away from the helplessness that greeted him most mornings.
"Focus on the breath, and find the stillness" he thought to himself, recalling the words of Doctor Westlin. Not for the first time he wished he was a Noctis cape, he would give almost anything to be able to forgo the panic that greeted him at the start of each day. After taking a moment to centre himself, and fully banishing the lingering memory of leather and plastic that always came with the rising of the sun, he pulled himself out of bed, leaving the covers in a messy tangle behind him. Throwing back the curtains, allowing weak yellow sunlight to brighten his bedroom, he started his morning stretches.
The room was fairly large, one of the reasons he had taken this apartment was the size of the bedroom. When he still lived in New York he used to have a tiny apartment, with a bedroom so small it felt like he was sleeping in a coffin. He couldn't even move out after he started working either, it would have attracted too much attention, too many questions about where he got the money.
When he moved to Brockton Bay, he made sure to get an apartment with a large bedroom, something with tall ceilings and wide windows. The room was sparse in terms of furniture, A king sized bed with its backrest against the wall dominated the centre of the room. There was a wardrobe built into the wall opposite it and a small bedside table tucked up against it that he bought for Claire when she stayed over. On the table sat a half finished crime novel, turned face down and splayed open so she didn't lose her place, and a small lamp, as well as a ceramic bowl she kept her retainer in when she stayed over.
The walls were a light blue-grey colour, tastefully decorated with landscape paintings he had picked up from local artists selling their work in the Lord's Market. Most of them were of Brocton Bay, either views from the boardwalk over the beach, or something from the surrounding mountains. All Except one, which had been painted by his half-sister for his birthday last October. That one showed the snow-covered trees of White Mountain national forest, in their home state of New Hampshire. It hung directly above the bed; the large canvas placed to draw the eye as you entered the room.
Between the bed and the wardrobe there was enough space to roll out an extra-large, purple exercise mat and go through some basic Tai Chi poses. He moved smoothly through the by now familiar motions, He had first started practicing at Claire's insistence, and in the 18 months since she started dragging him to her classes, he had grown to love the practice. He found the gentle motions and precise steps helped to separate the horror of rousing from the rest of his day. Even after Claire started training Krav Maga with the PRT troopers and stopped attending Tai Chi classes he had continued going to that little dojo she found, three times a week.
Half an hour later he finished his stretches, rolled the mat away and stashed it back in the wardrobe before making his way past the photograph lined walls into his bathroom. Closing the door behind him and stripping out of his boxers in an easy fluid motion he moved over to his shower and set the water running. He stepped back and gave the old boiler in his building time to build up pressure, waiting until steam was rolling over the top of his shower cubicle and fogging up the inside, before opening the door and stepping inside, he left the door slightly ajar though, so it wasn't completely closed on him, letting a small, cold breeze into his otherwise perfect shower.
If there was one reason he was still holding onto his apartment, rather than moving in with Claire at her new place, it was his shower. Her place was larger, cheaper and closer to work, it even had a larger bedroom. He was happy to admit that it was superior in nearly every way. When she had been looking at places to buy, after they started dating, she had gone out of her way to find a place that would make him more comfortable. He appreciated the effort, and he appreciated even more that she had asked him to move in with her. But she didn't have a shower like this one.
Ethan revelled in feeling of hot water slamming into his bare skin, letting the high-pressure water wash away his lingering fears. The pressure was key, the high-power shower flooded his power with an overwhelming amount of information making it impossible to focus on anything except the here and now. "Distraction is a coping mechanism Ethan" the words of Doctor Singh flitted through his mind, He clenched his fist slightly and ducked his head into the stream, drowning out the voice of his old therapist with an overwhelming torrent of water. He lost himself in the soothing pressure of the jets, revelling in the heat that soaked into his tired muscles and allowed himself to drift in the all-consuming information deluge gifted by is power.
Not all powers came with additional senses, he knew that from the parahuman studies courses he had been taking through the PRT. But it wasn't actually uncommon to get something, anything that allowed the brain to make sense of, or help it use the power that people suddenly found themselves with after their trigger. Claire described hers as a sort of gauge attached to a reservoir, with practice she was able to tell how much strength and durability she had stored based on how full the tank was. The new guy: Shawn, described something similar, except his was more modal, either on or off.
Ethan's power was different, it was more like a hyper-sensitivity across his whole body. Every single touch, the slightest pressure, lit up his brain with the knowledge of the energy it imparted, just waiting for him to reach out and grab it, shape it, and redirect it. He didn't get it in terms of numbers, more like greater feelings of pressure that radiated throughout his body, starting at the point it touched him. The greater the impact, the more kinetic energy imparted, the more his body resonated with that power.
At first it had terrified him, the ever-present feeling of pressure making him feel boxed in, back in that broken car just waking up, watching and waiting to die. But things change over the course of a decade. Now the pressure was just something there, something to live with. It helped that it came with the knowledge of how to be free, how to escape, how to never feel trapped again.
That thought made him snort. No, he was still trapped, but the box was bigger, the leash was looser, the jailers kinder, but he was far from a free man. "Learn to accept what you cannot change, and change what you cannot accept" the words of Doctor Macklin echoed in his mind, she may have been a quack, but a broken clock is right twice a day and all that.
After luxuriating in the hot water for longer than necessary, but for far less time than he wanted to, Ethan grabbed the soap and started to scrub himself down. Once clean, he switched off the shower and hopped out of the cubicle onto the bathmat, redirecting some of the energy from his fall to force the water that still clung to his body to spray back into the shower. He quickly towelled down just to be sure, before dressing. Heading down into his little galley kitchen he scarfed down some toast and coffee for a quick breakfast. Grabbing his lanyard from the little hook by the door, which proclaimed him to be Ethan Myers, Public relations co-ordinator for the PRT (a cover story he was sure was Director Piggot's idea of a joke) he left his apartment and headed down to wait for his car pool to pick him up.
While he waited, he decided to annoy Claire by spamming her phone with pictures of three-legged puppies, like he did most mornings when they were not staying in the same place. He was pretty proud of the fact that he had sent her hundreds of pictures by now and had never repeated a single one. He had felt a little bad, lying to Dragon, but her help in trawling the internet for dog shelters in New England had been invaluable, and had turned up a treasure trove of adorable dog pictures he could annoy Claire with.
And who knew, maybe if he could ever be convinced to leave his shower for her, they would actually adopt one of them.
"Since her first appearance, this new tinker has been spotted a further 3 times. Last night she apprehended 3 speculated members of the Empire 88 who had been harassing two women off the corner of Felton Street." Ethan looked at the screen projected behind were his boss was standing, the image showing people in their late 20's dressed to go clubbing. In the picture one of them was huddled under a jacket lent to her by a police officer, probably to hide some of the rips and tears in her tight pink dress. The other was kneeling next to her, a large bruise forming on her right cheek but otherwise looking unharmed. There was a small flicker and the image changed to show three unconscious men, all white, two with heavy tattoos and the third wearing the red and black of the Empire on a small patch sown inexpertly onto his jacket. Two of them were tied up, their hands secured behind their backs with a sort of off-white rope, the third appeared to have been glued to the floor. The officer in the picture was trying to un-stick him, without much luck.
"According to the police report, she dropped some kind of smoke bomb on the group, before disabling the attackers with sedative laced darts." The picture changed again, this time showing a close up off a small plastic dart, maybe an inch and a half long, with three stabilising fins and a divot drilled into the sharp metal point. "Unfortunately I haven't been able to analyse the sedative used, as it appears to have a short shelf life and becomes undetectable in the body shortly after it is administered, but preliminary investigations into all those that have been affected indicate that it is unlikely to cause lasting harm."
Ethan was surprised at the lack of emotion in Armsmaster's voice when he said he couldn't get hold of the young girl's tinkertech. He had expected at least a hint of annoyance, primarily because he knew his boss had recently begun research into safe and effective tranquilisers of his own.
"She has been spotted patrolling in and around Empire territory and all reported altercations we can confirm her presence at has involved the Empire in some manner. This may be coincidence, but our current theory is that she either feels threatened in some manner by the Empire, or they were involved in her trigger event." Armsmaster continued to speak, listing possible hate-crimes and events that happened in the last couple of months that may have been the girls tipping point, ignoring the uncomfortable looks Ethan shot him. It may be accurate, it may even be relevant, but it still felt wrong to dig into another capes trigger event behind their backs, especially in such a cold manner.
When the presentation ended, the projector powered down as the lights rose, revealing the heavy-set form of Director Piggot sat at the far end of the conference table. The only other person present, besides Ethan himself, for this meeting. She had been watching the series of slides stoically, as Armsmaster continued his presentation on the Bay's newest hero. There was silence for a moment, before Colin turned towards them, well, more towards Piggot, but definitely their general direction, and asked "Any questions?"
Director Piggot shifted in her chair, which creaked slightly as she moved. She was an unhealthy-looking woman, with a pale face, short cropped blonde hair and a pinched expression with a furrowed brow that made her look like she was perpetually scowling. Though, that may have just been when she was looking at Ethan. Her Navy-blue suit strained slightly, as it was a little small for her, having clearly been bought before she had gained weight from her various medical issues. Based on her current expression, Ethan privately had her pegged at about grouch level 2, clearly frustrated about something, but containing it for the moment.
When she spoke her voice was rough, like the crunching of heavy tires over gravel. "Do we have any indication of her speciality from what we have seen, or anything that we can use to apply ratings for our response teams in the event she turns hostile?"
Ethan clenched his fist at the brusque way in which his superior reached to reduce the suffering of a child into numbers she could file away in a threat assessment. He stayed quiet though, biting his tongue so that Armsmaster could answer "Insufficient data points to be certain and there is some confusion in the reports we have compiled on her, but current evidence based on the gear she has used to subdue criminals points to some kind of chemical tinker specialty. However, she may have a broader speciality we are not seeing, or perhaps a dual-focus." He stopped for breath, before continuing robotically "This could be anything from meta-materials, based on the unusual metals she seems to have used in her armour. To a medical focus which could explain her ability to create powerful, yet safe, sedatives. Until we get more information, we just don't know. It could also be that her specialty is broad enough to cover a multitude of different technologies and this is just all that she has been able to make with the time and resources available."
"And the suggested rating?"
"Given the broad range of equipment and weapons in her arsenal, I would recommend a tentative tinker 4 rating, subject to change based on any further information we find. I would also recommend a stranger 4 sub-rating for her documented invisibility" he nodded towards were Ethan was sitting without stopping "Plus, a low mover rating, this is speculative, but given Assault talked to her on the roof of a building, and the various pieces of witness testimony we have gathered, there is an indication of enhanced mobility. I recommend mover 1."
It was always hard for Ethan to read Armsmaster when he was wearing his power armour, its smooth lines were designed to give the impression of sleek confidence, and his level voice compounded with that to give the impression of utmost certainty in his conclusions. He knew that his boss was an experienced cape, and he had only been in the Protectorate for a couple of years now, but before then he had been Madcap for years. He knew you couldn't accurately rate a tinker's capabilities from a handful of interactions and sightings. Hell, Squealer had been active for 6 months now and they were only just starting to get a handle on what to expect where she was concerned. It was a near certainty that they were going to have to revise those numbers on a weekly basis for the foreseeable future.
"What are your initial impressions on her arsenal" continued Piggot, after she had finished jotting a few notes to herself on a pad of paper, eschewing the small laptop sat in front of her in favour of the analogue option.
"it appears to be an eclectic mix, the initial fight in the corner-shop included some kind of nausea gas, a knockout gas which I think was later refined into the sedative she now uses on her darts, some kind of rapid setting resin, a form of flame resistant ice and high quality silk ropes. While they were used effectively, a smarter loadout would have consisted mostly of her highly effective knock-out gas, in addition to her restraints. This leads me to believe she may not be entirely in control of the items she makes."
At this, Ethan spoke up for the first time this meeting, if you didn't include the impromptu beat poetry he greeted Armsmaster with when the man had the audacity to be a whole 2 minutes late for the meeting (secretly written months in advance and shelved, awaiting the opportune moment). "Are you suggesting she is a Chaos tinker?" He asked curiously, his parahuman studies course had featured a lot of trigger theory. Reading the studies on mover-striker powers had been enough to illicit panic attacks, but he had been able to complete the assignments on tinkers. The field was new, and there were debates as to how accurate the currently accepted theories were, but there were still some observable trends from all the information the PRT had gathered on tinkers over the past 20 years.
Nearly every tinker had a specialty. That was fairly common knowledge, it also wasn't the whole story. There were tinkers out there who could only create one thing, and just spent all their time repairing and improving it. There were tinkers with multiple specialities that may be completely independent or at odds with one another, and there were tinkers who, no matter how hard they tried, were never quite in control of what they built. How badly this affected them varied on a case by case basis, some could always get a something that approximated what they wanted, variations on a theme so to speak. Others were left completely at the whims of their power, during his time as a jail-breaker he had been contracted to retrieve a tinker whose speciality lay in body modification. The woman explained to him a little about her power after they got to the safe house, about how she would come out of a tinker fugue to find she had replaced a finger with a prosthetic, or removed her own eye to put in a new one, and that she wouldn't have the slightest idea what they did until she tested them.
A lot of people, when they thought of tinkers, thought of Hero, Armsmaster, or Dragon. Ethan always thought back to a haunted woman, with her slightly off-putting synthetic skin and her dead-eyed stare.
"We have to consider the possibility, if she is, it may explain some of the difficulties our thinkers have been having in determining further information about her or what she can make." Ethan was jerked out of his reverie on old acquaintances by Armsmaster answering his question. He reviewed those words in his mind for a second before asking in a confused tone
"Wait, we have thinker support for this?" That would be highly unusual, Brocton Bay did not have a thinker on the roster, so if one was required a request was placed to Watchdog; the PRT sub-division that housed the majority of the more powerful thinkers in the Protectorate. Ethan hadn't spent much time in New York with Claire before they were shipped out to Brocton Bay, so he wasn't sure if Watchdog was just extra-ordinarily busy, or if they were being left out in the cold, but it seemed that almost every single request for thinker support from the Protectorate ENE, was denied without a solid reason. That they put in a request for information on an independent was strange enough, the fact that they actually got a response was confusing as hell.
When he asked why they had submitted an information request on the girl Armsmaster responded; "It's standard procedure on new tinkers, they are usually the most unpredictable of fresh capes and in the highest demand. Watchdog is supposed to help us determine threat levels and what to expect when a new tinker is snapped up by the gangs before we can recruit them."
Ethan was quiet for a moment. He sat in his chair, drumming his fingers against the plastic arm, feeling the vibrations running down through the legs and into the floor. There was a faint aftershock, an echo from the floor as he picked up the slight shifts in posture from Armsmaster. Even fainter, he could just about feel the creaking of the chair the Director sat in. It was hard to tell, as she sat so still it must have been uncomfortable, but every so often she would shift and those movements would translate to her chair, which would touch the floor, which would touch his chair, and finally him.
The information was pretty garbled at that point, and it had taken him years to be able to discern even this much. But he found it calmed him, helped to centre him, and align his thoughts. Helped him not pick up his chair and throw it at his boss for talking about the forced gang recruitment of a (possibly) pre-teen girl as if it was an inevitability.
"What did they come up with, when it came to her?" he finally asked, once he was certain he no longer wanted to punt the other man through the window. He was certain some of his anger had bled through into his voice, as there was an awkward pause before anyone answered his question.
"There were some oddities when the Think tank examined her." Armsmaster started.
"Oddities? Explain." Barked the Director from where she sat, still jotting down notes with an expensive looking fountain pen.
"Three separate thinkers confirmed her as a surveillance and information warfare specialist. A fourth, when shown one of the few pictures of her that we have, was certain that there was no tinkertech present on her person, and a fifth shouted something about weaving after viewing the same pictures before spending the next 45 minutes laughing uncontrollably, he eventually had to be sedated. Though I am told this is not an unusual response for that particular individual."
"It sounds like she cooked up some kind of anti-thinker technology" Ethan mused, leaning one arm on the armrest of his chair, and cupping his chin in his hand.
"Which would be valuable in its own right" Answered Armsmaster, "But, developing something like that would still be at odds with what we have observed her using." There was a small whine from the servo's in his suit as he adjusted how he was standing again, this elicited a small frown, just visible underneath his helmet, before he spoke on "The confusion she has elicited in Watchdog has led to us getting considerably more information than we would usually get from one of their reports on a new cape, and is the primary reason you have been selected to lead the recruitment approach."
This was unexpected, he had thought that he was present in this meeting to provide more details, or insight into his written report. The possibility that they might want him to actively recruit the girl had never even crossed his mind. Given his history as a villain, and his probationary status, he wasn't technically allowed to lead recruitment approaches on adults, let alone pitch to juniors the benefits of Wards, the government's underage parahuman protection program.
"Wait you want me to do this, why not Battery, or Velocity. Or someone closer to her own age like Triumph?" He blurted out in surprise.
"Thinkers indicate you have the best chance of reaching out to her, if others made the attempt it has the potential to end poorly." Was Armsmaster's calm response, he seemed too prepared for Ethan's shock, and his response sounded formulaic, almost as if he was reading it off a screen. In fact, he probably was reading it off his visor, he probably prepared for this and has cue cards projected in front of his eyeballs. The smug bastard.
"I believe some congratulations are in order." Ethan turned his head slowly to look at the Director, who was looking at him sharply, her lips curled into a strange expression that he could generously call a smile. It was devoid of warmth though, almost predatory, like some kind of big cat or a wolf. "Your probationary period is being brought to an end early, you are being expedited to full Protectorate membership in order to facilitate your chances of recruiting this new parahuman." She put her pen back in its case, flipped her notebook closed and started to gather her things together. She rose ponderously to her feet and shuffled slowly to the door. She paused with one hand on the doorknob, turning back she looked over her shoulder briefly, her expression once more cast in stone. A small part of Ethan's brain noted that she had progressed to grouch level 3, most likely because she had been forced to say something nice to him.
Still slumped in his chair, one hand still resting against the leg of the chair, Ethan sat in a state of shock. His tongue felt heavy, like it was clasped in lead, his shoulders suddenly felt light, as if a great weight that he hadn't known he was carrying had suddenly been lifted. He was almost light-headed, it was a strange and heady feeling as a wave of heavy emotions crashed over his unprepared thoughts. Through all of this, he could only think of one thing to say. Turning to Armsmaster who was still standing awkwardly by the projector.
"Does this mean I get a pay rise?"
The door buzzer rang just as Ethan made one last minute adjustment to his tie. He listened to the loud buzzing sound as he stared in the mirror, meeting his own brown eyes for a rare second, before brushing a strand of hair out of his face. He turned away from his reflection, adjusted his cufflinks and went downstairs. As he walked, he could feel the reverberations of his black leather shoes, which he had shined to perfection that afternoon, through the apartment. The pattern was calming, helping to stem the building anxiety that was forming in the pit of his stomach.
The unfamiliar tightness of his tailored black trousers was constricting. He could feel the slight friction in the fabric as it pulled against itself while he walked, this was echoed in restricting feeling of his jacket, making him feel a little claustrophobic. A few years ago, he would not have been able to stand this. A few years ago, he would have torn off his suit within minutes out of a desire, no, a need for his skin to be free. He would have given in to that anxiety in his stomach, that overwhelming need to escape, he would have bowed before the unpleasant feelings and memories that it dragged up, he would have regressed.
But he was not the same person that he was 2 and a half years ago, he had grown, and he had changed, he hoped for the better. So, he put aside the fears and worries that made him feel anxious and restrained, he put out of mind the constant feedback from his power, instead he conjured a bright smile and opened the door to his apartment.
"Hi puppy, you look gorgeous tonight." He greeted his girlfriend, who was standing behind the door.
"Well, it's the best I could do on short notice." She responded lightly as she stepped into the apartment. As she exited the hallway and entered his living space Ethan ran an appreciative eye over his partner. Her brown hair was cut short in an asymmetric bob cut, it shimmered a little in the electric lights overhead, revealing little specks of reds and yellows as she turned her head this way and that. Her makeup was done to accentuate her hazel eyes and sharp cheekbones and as she passed him by, he caught a faint whiff or her lilac perfume.
Her dress was deep bottle green that seemed to shift as she moved, giving the illusion that it clung tightly to her body, while also concealing her figure in a tantalising dance of distractions. She was wearing heels, unusually for her, which meant that she stood about 3 or 4 inches shorter than him. He met her eyes for a second, and realised she had been spending the past 30 seconds or so checking him out, just as he had been doing to her. He let out a laugh as she blushed, asking "Shall I spin so you can get a better look?" as he turned on his heel slowly.
"You can't fault me for being surprised" she murmured as he finished his spin and moved forward to embrace her "It's not every day I see you in a suit."
"Well, it's a special occasion."
Her eyes fluttered closed for a second as he bent down to kiss her, one hand coming up to rest lightly on her cheek. With that casual touch he could feel the tension in her body, the sure movement of her muscles. When he really focused, he sometimes thought he could hear the gentle flutter of her heartbeat.
As the kiss broke, but before she opened her eyes, he gently nipped her on the ear with his teeth, just next to her tiny gold stud earrings and whispered, "You really do look incredible."
He could tell she was blushing from the heat of her cheek next to his, and a moment later he felt her hot breath next to his ear "You said it was a special occasion" she paused, and Ethan suddenly felt a strong force lift him, spin him and force him to lean backwards as Claire activated her power for a second to allow her to dip him as if the two of them were dancing. Her arms supporting his upper body their faces still right next to each other she smiled "I do expect more of an explanation than that at some point though."
"All in good time puppy" he said with a wink.
After a short taxi ride spent whispering in the back seats, clutching each other's hands and giggling while the middle-aged man in the driving seat pointedly pretended that he wasn't there, giving them the illusion of privacy, the arrived at the Restaurant. The Garden was a favourite of theirs, and it had been since they first started dating a year and a half ago. It was an atmospheric little Chinese restaurant tucked away between a nail salon and an Asian supermarket, it was so small that at full capacity it could only fit about 16 diners. Ethan had been recommended it by one of the PRT troopers who said he went there because it reminded him of his grandmother's cooking. When he first brought Claire, on their second date, he had discovered her love for good Chinese food.
Climbing smoothly out of the taxi after paying the driver he stepped around the back of the car and opened the door for Claire with a flourish and a small bow "M'lady" he said, offering a hand to help her out the car. She gave him an exasperated look, though she did accept his hand, letting herself be helped from the car and ushered to the front door. Swinging the now faded, gilded doors open and stepping aside so that Claire could enter first.
Waiting a beat for her to get through the foyer he entered the building letting the door swing shut behind him. From ahead he heard a small gasp, supressing a grin he stepped up next to his girlfriend and let out a low whistle. "Quiet night tonight isn't it." He said as she stared at the scene in front of her.
The room, which was usually full of cramped wooden tables and mismatched chairs was now empty save for a single table. It was set in the centre of the room with a white tablecloth, with a long-tapered candle burning away merrily in a squat brass candlestick. The usual lights were switched off, replaced with long strips of faintly flickering fairy lights arranged in concentric circles above the table, between them and the candle it created a sort of oasis of light in the middle of the dark restaurant.
Next to the table, a man of unidentifiable heritage wearing a white shirt and black waistcoat, moved calmly to pull out the chairs for the two of them to sit, before retreating to the bar on the far side of the room to collect menus. "You booked out the whole restaurant?" Claire's eyes were a little wide still as she turned to look at him, her voice a faint whisper.
"I don't remember doing anything like that, they must just like us, we do come here a lot." He responded playfully, she gave him a light shove with one hand, making him step back and ground the energy from it through his right foot.
"Don't play games with me, why did you book the whole restaurant." She hissed, trying and failing to avoid raising her voice.
Taking her hand in his, he gently led her towards the table, as she sank slowly into her seat he leaned down and told her "It's a special occasion."
"They ended your probation? You did all this because they ended your probation?" Claire asked him, one hand clutching his, the other holding her shoes as the pair of them meandered slowly across the starlit sands on one of the nicer beaches in Brocton Bay. "I thought your probation was due to end in 6 months anyway?" she continued.
"I know, I had to bring everything forward, I was worried I wouldn't be able to book the restaurant on such short notice." He responded, managing to keep a straight face up until the point where she bumped her hip against his. He pretended to stumble away from her at the contact, feigning a yelp he pulled out of her grip to go sprawling on the sand. He lay there for a second, before he felt her toes digging gently but persistently into his side, just below his ribs.
"Don't be an ass." She laughed, "Get up before you ruin your suit."
He rolled to his feet, stretching himself out a bit to try and get the sand to drain away out from his suit. They walked further down the beach before he stopped to take off his own shoes, pouring the grit and sand that had accumulated in them out onto the beach. When they were both barefoot the continued their slow walk, away from the boat graveyard, towards the city proper, letting the sound of the ocean lapping away at the shore accompany them as they walked.
After 10 minutes or so of walking in silence, Claire spoke "They want you to lead the recruitment on this new tinker?" she said, now with both her arms wrapped around his as she pulled closer to him for warmth.
Stopping to shrug out his jacket and drape it around her shoulders he replied "I've been calling her Sprite, in my head. Like the Fairies you would find in a forest." He paused a second to pull her closer again once she had put her arms through the jacket, "And yes, apparently the Think Tank believe I have the best shot of getting her off the streets, and Piggot is desperately trying to avoid the gangs picking up another tinker."
"I think they are right; you probably do have a better chance than the rest of us." Claire said, he looked down at her, she stared back up at him, her eyes full of moonlight, her face drawn into a more serious expression "You told me you were about that age when you triggered, you were what, 13?"
"I was 12." He whispered, once again momentarily reliving the slam of the car door, and the rattling of the metal frame as he battered against the window, watching the retreating form of his father disappear into the darkness as a bright light filtered in around him from the other side. He shook his head, banishing the memory even as it tried to cling to him.
"Hey, I'm right here, come back to me Ethan." Soft words whispered from a mile away drew his focus back to Claire, he gave her an unsteady smile in response. "Lots of capes trigger young Puppy." He said sadly.
"And how many of them take the time to work through what happened, how many have the strength to face it, to not let it define them. How many of them change from the person their power makes them?" She shot back, fiercely. He could only shake his head at this old argument, he knew how broken he still was, and no matter how much she spoke of her pride at his growth, or how he had moved away from his past, he knew that there would always be a little piece of him that stayed there.
She seemed to sense his reluctance to go over it again and backed off. The pair of them continued to walk until Ethan lead them over to a particular sand bank, a little way away from the steps that led up to the boardwalk. "Recognise this place?" He asked her, a cheeky grin returning to his face.
"Should I?" she said, confusedly looking around at the unremarkable little spot, as if expecting a great secret to reveal itself at her cursory inspection.
"This is the place where you first agreed to go out with me." He told her, spreading his arms apart grandly.
"Wait, I thought that was at HQ, when I made you agree to go to that school with me to read stories to children?" was the befuddled response. He wagged a finger in her face, shaking his head emphatically.
"Nu uh uh, you told me you might agree to go out with me if I did that, but you didn't agree to get coffee with me until about 2 weeks after that." Looking at her blank face he pouted a little "Remember, it was early September, a bright sunny day, lots of people about enjoying the last of the good weather, we were fighting Oni Lee…"
"Wait, that doesn't count, I thought you were bleeding out when you asked me." She interjected hotly.
"Of course, it counts, why do you think I let him stab me?"
"Are you telling me you let a psychopath stab you in the leg because you thought it would give you a better chance of a date with me?" Her voice rose to be a little shrill at the end of that sentence, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was saying.
"Well, it worked didn't it?" he shot back.
She turned her back to him, throwing her hands up in the air as she said, "You are unbelievable."
While her back was turned, he fumbled for the box in his back pocket. Moving silently, he drew it out, letting his fingers trace across the engraved metal, before slipping into the grooves of the catch. Flicking the latch aside he gently prised it open, taking great care to make no sudden movements, so he didn't spill its contents onto the sand. As the moonlight played across the white metal band inside, and the stars reflected off the small cluster of stones set through it, he gently lowered himself down onto one knew and waited for her to turn around.
This chapter was fun to write, Ethan I felt came pretty naturally to me, it was Piggot and Battery that I struggled with. I now understand why so many fic writers complain about having to write the Director, anything other than POV from her is remarkably tricky to balance.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter, please let me know what you think about my second Interlude. Regular chapter next time, after that one I may take a short hiatus to prepare for some big job interviews in the middle of June.
Edit: minor grammar corrections
"Focus on the breath, and find the stillness" he thought to himself, recalling the words of Doctor Westlin. Not for the first time he wished he was a Noctis cape, he would give almost anything to be able to forgo the panic that greeted him at the start of each day. After taking a moment to centre himself, and fully banishing the lingering memory of leather and plastic that always came with the rising of the sun, he pulled himself out of bed, leaving the covers in a messy tangle behind him. Throwing back the curtains, allowing weak yellow sunlight to brighten his bedroom, he started his morning stretches.
The room was fairly large, one of the reasons he had taken this apartment was the size of the bedroom. When he still lived in New York he used to have a tiny apartment, with a bedroom so small it felt like he was sleeping in a coffin. He couldn't even move out after he started working either, it would have attracted too much attention, too many questions about where he got the money.
When he moved to Brockton Bay, he made sure to get an apartment with a large bedroom, something with tall ceilings and wide windows. The room was sparse in terms of furniture, A king sized bed with its backrest against the wall dominated the centre of the room. There was a wardrobe built into the wall opposite it and a small bedside table tucked up against it that he bought for Claire when she stayed over. On the table sat a half finished crime novel, turned face down and splayed open so she didn't lose her place, and a small lamp, as well as a ceramic bowl she kept her retainer in when she stayed over.
The walls were a light blue-grey colour, tastefully decorated with landscape paintings he had picked up from local artists selling their work in the Lord's Market. Most of them were of Brocton Bay, either views from the boardwalk over the beach, or something from the surrounding mountains. All Except one, which had been painted by his half-sister for his birthday last October. That one showed the snow-covered trees of White Mountain national forest, in their home state of New Hampshire. It hung directly above the bed; the large canvas placed to draw the eye as you entered the room.
Between the bed and the wardrobe there was enough space to roll out an extra-large, purple exercise mat and go through some basic Tai Chi poses. He moved smoothly through the by now familiar motions, He had first started practicing at Claire's insistence, and in the 18 months since she started dragging him to her classes, he had grown to love the practice. He found the gentle motions and precise steps helped to separate the horror of rousing from the rest of his day. Even after Claire started training Krav Maga with the PRT troopers and stopped attending Tai Chi classes he had continued going to that little dojo she found, three times a week.
Half an hour later he finished his stretches, rolled the mat away and stashed it back in the wardrobe before making his way past the photograph lined walls into his bathroom. Closing the door behind him and stripping out of his boxers in an easy fluid motion he moved over to his shower and set the water running. He stepped back and gave the old boiler in his building time to build up pressure, waiting until steam was rolling over the top of his shower cubicle and fogging up the inside, before opening the door and stepping inside, he left the door slightly ajar though, so it wasn't completely closed on him, letting a small, cold breeze into his otherwise perfect shower.
If there was one reason he was still holding onto his apartment, rather than moving in with Claire at her new place, it was his shower. Her place was larger, cheaper and closer to work, it even had a larger bedroom. He was happy to admit that it was superior in nearly every way. When she had been looking at places to buy, after they started dating, she had gone out of her way to find a place that would make him more comfortable. He appreciated the effort, and he appreciated even more that she had asked him to move in with her. But she didn't have a shower like this one.
Ethan revelled in feeling of hot water slamming into his bare skin, letting the high-pressure water wash away his lingering fears. The pressure was key, the high-power shower flooded his power with an overwhelming amount of information making it impossible to focus on anything except the here and now. "Distraction is a coping mechanism Ethan" the words of Doctor Singh flitted through his mind, He clenched his fist slightly and ducked his head into the stream, drowning out the voice of his old therapist with an overwhelming torrent of water. He lost himself in the soothing pressure of the jets, revelling in the heat that soaked into his tired muscles and allowed himself to drift in the all-consuming information deluge gifted by is power.
Not all powers came with additional senses, he knew that from the parahuman studies courses he had been taking through the PRT. But it wasn't actually uncommon to get something, anything that allowed the brain to make sense of, or help it use the power that people suddenly found themselves with after their trigger. Claire described hers as a sort of gauge attached to a reservoir, with practice she was able to tell how much strength and durability she had stored based on how full the tank was. The new guy: Shawn, described something similar, except his was more modal, either on or off.
Ethan's power was different, it was more like a hyper-sensitivity across his whole body. Every single touch, the slightest pressure, lit up his brain with the knowledge of the energy it imparted, just waiting for him to reach out and grab it, shape it, and redirect it. He didn't get it in terms of numbers, more like greater feelings of pressure that radiated throughout his body, starting at the point it touched him. The greater the impact, the more kinetic energy imparted, the more his body resonated with that power.
At first it had terrified him, the ever-present feeling of pressure making him feel boxed in, back in that broken car just waking up, watching and waiting to die. But things change over the course of a decade. Now the pressure was just something there, something to live with. It helped that it came with the knowledge of how to be free, how to escape, how to never feel trapped again.
That thought made him snort. No, he was still trapped, but the box was bigger, the leash was looser, the jailers kinder, but he was far from a free man. "Learn to accept what you cannot change, and change what you cannot accept" the words of Doctor Macklin echoed in his mind, she may have been a quack, but a broken clock is right twice a day and all that.
After luxuriating in the hot water for longer than necessary, but for far less time than he wanted to, Ethan grabbed the soap and started to scrub himself down. Once clean, he switched off the shower and hopped out of the cubicle onto the bathmat, redirecting some of the energy from his fall to force the water that still clung to his body to spray back into the shower. He quickly towelled down just to be sure, before dressing. Heading down into his little galley kitchen he scarfed down some toast and coffee for a quick breakfast. Grabbing his lanyard from the little hook by the door, which proclaimed him to be Ethan Myers, Public relations co-ordinator for the PRT (a cover story he was sure was Director Piggot's idea of a joke) he left his apartment and headed down to wait for his car pool to pick him up.
While he waited, he decided to annoy Claire by spamming her phone with pictures of three-legged puppies, like he did most mornings when they were not staying in the same place. He was pretty proud of the fact that he had sent her hundreds of pictures by now and had never repeated a single one. He had felt a little bad, lying to Dragon, but her help in trawling the internet for dog shelters in New England had been invaluable, and had turned up a treasure trove of adorable dog pictures he could annoy Claire with.
And who knew, maybe if he could ever be convinced to leave his shower for her, they would actually adopt one of them.
"Since her first appearance, this new tinker has been spotted a further 3 times. Last night she apprehended 3 speculated members of the Empire 88 who had been harassing two women off the corner of Felton Street." Ethan looked at the screen projected behind were his boss was standing, the image showing people in their late 20's dressed to go clubbing. In the picture one of them was huddled under a jacket lent to her by a police officer, probably to hide some of the rips and tears in her tight pink dress. The other was kneeling next to her, a large bruise forming on her right cheek but otherwise looking unharmed. There was a small flicker and the image changed to show three unconscious men, all white, two with heavy tattoos and the third wearing the red and black of the Empire on a small patch sown inexpertly onto his jacket. Two of them were tied up, their hands secured behind their backs with a sort of off-white rope, the third appeared to have been glued to the floor. The officer in the picture was trying to un-stick him, without much luck.
"According to the police report, she dropped some kind of smoke bomb on the group, before disabling the attackers with sedative laced darts." The picture changed again, this time showing a close up off a small plastic dart, maybe an inch and a half long, with three stabilising fins and a divot drilled into the sharp metal point. "Unfortunately I haven't been able to analyse the sedative used, as it appears to have a short shelf life and becomes undetectable in the body shortly after it is administered, but preliminary investigations into all those that have been affected indicate that it is unlikely to cause lasting harm."
Ethan was surprised at the lack of emotion in Armsmaster's voice when he said he couldn't get hold of the young girl's tinkertech. He had expected at least a hint of annoyance, primarily because he knew his boss had recently begun research into safe and effective tranquilisers of his own.
"She has been spotted patrolling in and around Empire territory and all reported altercations we can confirm her presence at has involved the Empire in some manner. This may be coincidence, but our current theory is that she either feels threatened in some manner by the Empire, or they were involved in her trigger event." Armsmaster continued to speak, listing possible hate-crimes and events that happened in the last couple of months that may have been the girls tipping point, ignoring the uncomfortable looks Ethan shot him. It may be accurate, it may even be relevant, but it still felt wrong to dig into another capes trigger event behind their backs, especially in such a cold manner.
When the presentation ended, the projector powered down as the lights rose, revealing the heavy-set form of Director Piggot sat at the far end of the conference table. The only other person present, besides Ethan himself, for this meeting. She had been watching the series of slides stoically, as Armsmaster continued his presentation on the Bay's newest hero. There was silence for a moment, before Colin turned towards them, well, more towards Piggot, but definitely their general direction, and asked "Any questions?"
Director Piggot shifted in her chair, which creaked slightly as she moved. She was an unhealthy-looking woman, with a pale face, short cropped blonde hair and a pinched expression with a furrowed brow that made her look like she was perpetually scowling. Though, that may have just been when she was looking at Ethan. Her Navy-blue suit strained slightly, as it was a little small for her, having clearly been bought before she had gained weight from her various medical issues. Based on her current expression, Ethan privately had her pegged at about grouch level 2, clearly frustrated about something, but containing it for the moment.
When she spoke her voice was rough, like the crunching of heavy tires over gravel. "Do we have any indication of her speciality from what we have seen, or anything that we can use to apply ratings for our response teams in the event she turns hostile?"
Ethan clenched his fist at the brusque way in which his superior reached to reduce the suffering of a child into numbers she could file away in a threat assessment. He stayed quiet though, biting his tongue so that Armsmaster could answer "Insufficient data points to be certain and there is some confusion in the reports we have compiled on her, but current evidence based on the gear she has used to subdue criminals points to some kind of chemical tinker specialty. However, she may have a broader speciality we are not seeing, or perhaps a dual-focus." He stopped for breath, before continuing robotically "This could be anything from meta-materials, based on the unusual metals she seems to have used in her armour. To a medical focus which could explain her ability to create powerful, yet safe, sedatives. Until we get more information, we just don't know. It could also be that her specialty is broad enough to cover a multitude of different technologies and this is just all that she has been able to make with the time and resources available."
"And the suggested rating?"
"Given the broad range of equipment and weapons in her arsenal, I would recommend a tentative tinker 4 rating, subject to change based on any further information we find. I would also recommend a stranger 4 sub-rating for her documented invisibility" he nodded towards were Ethan was sitting without stopping "Plus, a low mover rating, this is speculative, but given Assault talked to her on the roof of a building, and the various pieces of witness testimony we have gathered, there is an indication of enhanced mobility. I recommend mover 1."
It was always hard for Ethan to read Armsmaster when he was wearing his power armour, its smooth lines were designed to give the impression of sleek confidence, and his level voice compounded with that to give the impression of utmost certainty in his conclusions. He knew that his boss was an experienced cape, and he had only been in the Protectorate for a couple of years now, but before then he had been Madcap for years. He knew you couldn't accurately rate a tinker's capabilities from a handful of interactions and sightings. Hell, Squealer had been active for 6 months now and they were only just starting to get a handle on what to expect where she was concerned. It was a near certainty that they were going to have to revise those numbers on a weekly basis for the foreseeable future.
"What are your initial impressions on her arsenal" continued Piggot, after she had finished jotting a few notes to herself on a pad of paper, eschewing the small laptop sat in front of her in favour of the analogue option.
"it appears to be an eclectic mix, the initial fight in the corner-shop included some kind of nausea gas, a knockout gas which I think was later refined into the sedative she now uses on her darts, some kind of rapid setting resin, a form of flame resistant ice and high quality silk ropes. While they were used effectively, a smarter loadout would have consisted mostly of her highly effective knock-out gas, in addition to her restraints. This leads me to believe she may not be entirely in control of the items she makes."
At this, Ethan spoke up for the first time this meeting, if you didn't include the impromptu beat poetry he greeted Armsmaster with when the man had the audacity to be a whole 2 minutes late for the meeting (secretly written months in advance and shelved, awaiting the opportune moment). "Are you suggesting she is a Chaos tinker?" He asked curiously, his parahuman studies course had featured a lot of trigger theory. Reading the studies on mover-striker powers had been enough to illicit panic attacks, but he had been able to complete the assignments on tinkers. The field was new, and there were debates as to how accurate the currently accepted theories were, but there were still some observable trends from all the information the PRT had gathered on tinkers over the past 20 years.
Nearly every tinker had a specialty. That was fairly common knowledge, it also wasn't the whole story. There were tinkers out there who could only create one thing, and just spent all their time repairing and improving it. There were tinkers with multiple specialities that may be completely independent or at odds with one another, and there were tinkers who, no matter how hard they tried, were never quite in control of what they built. How badly this affected them varied on a case by case basis, some could always get a something that approximated what they wanted, variations on a theme so to speak. Others were left completely at the whims of their power, during his time as a jail-breaker he had been contracted to retrieve a tinker whose speciality lay in body modification. The woman explained to him a little about her power after they got to the safe house, about how she would come out of a tinker fugue to find she had replaced a finger with a prosthetic, or removed her own eye to put in a new one, and that she wouldn't have the slightest idea what they did until she tested them.
A lot of people, when they thought of tinkers, thought of Hero, Armsmaster, or Dragon. Ethan always thought back to a haunted woman, with her slightly off-putting synthetic skin and her dead-eyed stare.
"We have to consider the possibility, if she is, it may explain some of the difficulties our thinkers have been having in determining further information about her or what she can make." Ethan was jerked out of his reverie on old acquaintances by Armsmaster answering his question. He reviewed those words in his mind for a second before asking in a confused tone
"Wait, we have thinker support for this?" That would be highly unusual, Brocton Bay did not have a thinker on the roster, so if one was required a request was placed to Watchdog; the PRT sub-division that housed the majority of the more powerful thinkers in the Protectorate. Ethan hadn't spent much time in New York with Claire before they were shipped out to Brocton Bay, so he wasn't sure if Watchdog was just extra-ordinarily busy, or if they were being left out in the cold, but it seemed that almost every single request for thinker support from the Protectorate ENE, was denied without a solid reason. That they put in a request for information on an independent was strange enough, the fact that they actually got a response was confusing as hell.
When he asked why they had submitted an information request on the girl Armsmaster responded; "It's standard procedure on new tinkers, they are usually the most unpredictable of fresh capes and in the highest demand. Watchdog is supposed to help us determine threat levels and what to expect when a new tinker is snapped up by the gangs before we can recruit them."
Ethan was quiet for a moment. He sat in his chair, drumming his fingers against the plastic arm, feeling the vibrations running down through the legs and into the floor. There was a faint aftershock, an echo from the floor as he picked up the slight shifts in posture from Armsmaster. Even fainter, he could just about feel the creaking of the chair the Director sat in. It was hard to tell, as she sat so still it must have been uncomfortable, but every so often she would shift and those movements would translate to her chair, which would touch the floor, which would touch his chair, and finally him.
The information was pretty garbled at that point, and it had taken him years to be able to discern even this much. But he found it calmed him, helped to centre him, and align his thoughts. Helped him not pick up his chair and throw it at his boss for talking about the forced gang recruitment of a (possibly) pre-teen girl as if it was an inevitability.
"What did they come up with, when it came to her?" he finally asked, once he was certain he no longer wanted to punt the other man through the window. He was certain some of his anger had bled through into his voice, as there was an awkward pause before anyone answered his question.
"There were some oddities when the Think tank examined her." Armsmaster started.
"Oddities? Explain." Barked the Director from where she sat, still jotting down notes with an expensive looking fountain pen.
"Three separate thinkers confirmed her as a surveillance and information warfare specialist. A fourth, when shown one of the few pictures of her that we have, was certain that there was no tinkertech present on her person, and a fifth shouted something about weaving after viewing the same pictures before spending the next 45 minutes laughing uncontrollably, he eventually had to be sedated. Though I am told this is not an unusual response for that particular individual."
"It sounds like she cooked up some kind of anti-thinker technology" Ethan mused, leaning one arm on the armrest of his chair, and cupping his chin in his hand.
"Which would be valuable in its own right" Answered Armsmaster, "But, developing something like that would still be at odds with what we have observed her using." There was a small whine from the servo's in his suit as he adjusted how he was standing again, this elicited a small frown, just visible underneath his helmet, before he spoke on "The confusion she has elicited in Watchdog has led to us getting considerably more information than we would usually get from one of their reports on a new cape, and is the primary reason you have been selected to lead the recruitment approach."
This was unexpected, he had thought that he was present in this meeting to provide more details, or insight into his written report. The possibility that they might want him to actively recruit the girl had never even crossed his mind. Given his history as a villain, and his probationary status, he wasn't technically allowed to lead recruitment approaches on adults, let alone pitch to juniors the benefits of Wards, the government's underage parahuman protection program.
"Wait you want me to do this, why not Battery, or Velocity. Or someone closer to her own age like Triumph?" He blurted out in surprise.
"Thinkers indicate you have the best chance of reaching out to her, if others made the attempt it has the potential to end poorly." Was Armsmaster's calm response, he seemed too prepared for Ethan's shock, and his response sounded formulaic, almost as if he was reading it off a screen. In fact, he probably was reading it off his visor, he probably prepared for this and has cue cards projected in front of his eyeballs. The smug bastard.
"I believe some congratulations are in order." Ethan turned his head slowly to look at the Director, who was looking at him sharply, her lips curled into a strange expression that he could generously call a smile. It was devoid of warmth though, almost predatory, like some kind of big cat or a wolf. "Your probationary period is being brought to an end early, you are being expedited to full Protectorate membership in order to facilitate your chances of recruiting this new parahuman." She put her pen back in its case, flipped her notebook closed and started to gather her things together. She rose ponderously to her feet and shuffled slowly to the door. She paused with one hand on the doorknob, turning back she looked over her shoulder briefly, her expression once more cast in stone. A small part of Ethan's brain noted that she had progressed to grouch level 3, most likely because she had been forced to say something nice to him.
Still slumped in his chair, one hand still resting against the leg of the chair, Ethan sat in a state of shock. His tongue felt heavy, like it was clasped in lead, his shoulders suddenly felt light, as if a great weight that he hadn't known he was carrying had suddenly been lifted. He was almost light-headed, it was a strange and heady feeling as a wave of heavy emotions crashed over his unprepared thoughts. Through all of this, he could only think of one thing to say. Turning to Armsmaster who was still standing awkwardly by the projector.
"Does this mean I get a pay rise?"
The door buzzer rang just as Ethan made one last minute adjustment to his tie. He listened to the loud buzzing sound as he stared in the mirror, meeting his own brown eyes for a rare second, before brushing a strand of hair out of his face. He turned away from his reflection, adjusted his cufflinks and went downstairs. As he walked, he could feel the reverberations of his black leather shoes, which he had shined to perfection that afternoon, through the apartment. The pattern was calming, helping to stem the building anxiety that was forming in the pit of his stomach.
The unfamiliar tightness of his tailored black trousers was constricting. He could feel the slight friction in the fabric as it pulled against itself while he walked, this was echoed in restricting feeling of his jacket, making him feel a little claustrophobic. A few years ago, he would not have been able to stand this. A few years ago, he would have torn off his suit within minutes out of a desire, no, a need for his skin to be free. He would have given in to that anxiety in his stomach, that overwhelming need to escape, he would have bowed before the unpleasant feelings and memories that it dragged up, he would have regressed.
But he was not the same person that he was 2 and a half years ago, he had grown, and he had changed, he hoped for the better. So, he put aside the fears and worries that made him feel anxious and restrained, he put out of mind the constant feedback from his power, instead he conjured a bright smile and opened the door to his apartment.
"Hi puppy, you look gorgeous tonight." He greeted his girlfriend, who was standing behind the door.
"Well, it's the best I could do on short notice." She responded lightly as she stepped into the apartment. As she exited the hallway and entered his living space Ethan ran an appreciative eye over his partner. Her brown hair was cut short in an asymmetric bob cut, it shimmered a little in the electric lights overhead, revealing little specks of reds and yellows as she turned her head this way and that. Her makeup was done to accentuate her hazel eyes and sharp cheekbones and as she passed him by, he caught a faint whiff or her lilac perfume.
Her dress was deep bottle green that seemed to shift as she moved, giving the illusion that it clung tightly to her body, while also concealing her figure in a tantalising dance of distractions. She was wearing heels, unusually for her, which meant that she stood about 3 or 4 inches shorter than him. He met her eyes for a second, and realised she had been spending the past 30 seconds or so checking him out, just as he had been doing to her. He let out a laugh as she blushed, asking "Shall I spin so you can get a better look?" as he turned on his heel slowly.
"You can't fault me for being surprised" she murmured as he finished his spin and moved forward to embrace her "It's not every day I see you in a suit."
"Well, it's a special occasion."
Her eyes fluttered closed for a second as he bent down to kiss her, one hand coming up to rest lightly on her cheek. With that casual touch he could feel the tension in her body, the sure movement of her muscles. When he really focused, he sometimes thought he could hear the gentle flutter of her heartbeat.
As the kiss broke, but before she opened her eyes, he gently nipped her on the ear with his teeth, just next to her tiny gold stud earrings and whispered, "You really do look incredible."
He could tell she was blushing from the heat of her cheek next to his, and a moment later he felt her hot breath next to his ear "You said it was a special occasion" she paused, and Ethan suddenly felt a strong force lift him, spin him and force him to lean backwards as Claire activated her power for a second to allow her to dip him as if the two of them were dancing. Her arms supporting his upper body their faces still right next to each other she smiled "I do expect more of an explanation than that at some point though."
"All in good time puppy" he said with a wink.
After a short taxi ride spent whispering in the back seats, clutching each other's hands and giggling while the middle-aged man in the driving seat pointedly pretended that he wasn't there, giving them the illusion of privacy, the arrived at the Restaurant. The Garden was a favourite of theirs, and it had been since they first started dating a year and a half ago. It was an atmospheric little Chinese restaurant tucked away between a nail salon and an Asian supermarket, it was so small that at full capacity it could only fit about 16 diners. Ethan had been recommended it by one of the PRT troopers who said he went there because it reminded him of his grandmother's cooking. When he first brought Claire, on their second date, he had discovered her love for good Chinese food.
Climbing smoothly out of the taxi after paying the driver he stepped around the back of the car and opened the door for Claire with a flourish and a small bow "M'lady" he said, offering a hand to help her out the car. She gave him an exasperated look, though she did accept his hand, letting herself be helped from the car and ushered to the front door. Swinging the now faded, gilded doors open and stepping aside so that Claire could enter first.
Waiting a beat for her to get through the foyer he entered the building letting the door swing shut behind him. From ahead he heard a small gasp, supressing a grin he stepped up next to his girlfriend and let out a low whistle. "Quiet night tonight isn't it." He said as she stared at the scene in front of her.
The room, which was usually full of cramped wooden tables and mismatched chairs was now empty save for a single table. It was set in the centre of the room with a white tablecloth, with a long-tapered candle burning away merrily in a squat brass candlestick. The usual lights were switched off, replaced with long strips of faintly flickering fairy lights arranged in concentric circles above the table, between them and the candle it created a sort of oasis of light in the middle of the dark restaurant.
Next to the table, a man of unidentifiable heritage wearing a white shirt and black waistcoat, moved calmly to pull out the chairs for the two of them to sit, before retreating to the bar on the far side of the room to collect menus. "You booked out the whole restaurant?" Claire's eyes were a little wide still as she turned to look at him, her voice a faint whisper.
"I don't remember doing anything like that, they must just like us, we do come here a lot." He responded playfully, she gave him a light shove with one hand, making him step back and ground the energy from it through his right foot.
"Don't play games with me, why did you book the whole restaurant." She hissed, trying and failing to avoid raising her voice.
Taking her hand in his, he gently led her towards the table, as she sank slowly into her seat he leaned down and told her "It's a special occasion."
"They ended your probation? You did all this because they ended your probation?" Claire asked him, one hand clutching his, the other holding her shoes as the pair of them meandered slowly across the starlit sands on one of the nicer beaches in Brocton Bay. "I thought your probation was due to end in 6 months anyway?" she continued.
"I know, I had to bring everything forward, I was worried I wouldn't be able to book the restaurant on such short notice." He responded, managing to keep a straight face up until the point where she bumped her hip against his. He pretended to stumble away from her at the contact, feigning a yelp he pulled out of her grip to go sprawling on the sand. He lay there for a second, before he felt her toes digging gently but persistently into his side, just below his ribs.
"Don't be an ass." She laughed, "Get up before you ruin your suit."
He rolled to his feet, stretching himself out a bit to try and get the sand to drain away out from his suit. They walked further down the beach before he stopped to take off his own shoes, pouring the grit and sand that had accumulated in them out onto the beach. When they were both barefoot the continued their slow walk, away from the boat graveyard, towards the city proper, letting the sound of the ocean lapping away at the shore accompany them as they walked.
After 10 minutes or so of walking in silence, Claire spoke "They want you to lead the recruitment on this new tinker?" she said, now with both her arms wrapped around his as she pulled closer to him for warmth.
Stopping to shrug out his jacket and drape it around her shoulders he replied "I've been calling her Sprite, in my head. Like the Fairies you would find in a forest." He paused a second to pull her closer again once she had put her arms through the jacket, "And yes, apparently the Think Tank believe I have the best shot of getting her off the streets, and Piggot is desperately trying to avoid the gangs picking up another tinker."
"I think they are right; you probably do have a better chance than the rest of us." Claire said, he looked down at her, she stared back up at him, her eyes full of moonlight, her face drawn into a more serious expression "You told me you were about that age when you triggered, you were what, 13?"
"I was 12." He whispered, once again momentarily reliving the slam of the car door, and the rattling of the metal frame as he battered against the window, watching the retreating form of his father disappear into the darkness as a bright light filtered in around him from the other side. He shook his head, banishing the memory even as it tried to cling to him.
"Hey, I'm right here, come back to me Ethan." Soft words whispered from a mile away drew his focus back to Claire, he gave her an unsteady smile in response. "Lots of capes trigger young Puppy." He said sadly.
"And how many of them take the time to work through what happened, how many have the strength to face it, to not let it define them. How many of them change from the person their power makes them?" She shot back, fiercely. He could only shake his head at this old argument, he knew how broken he still was, and no matter how much she spoke of her pride at his growth, or how he had moved away from his past, he knew that there would always be a little piece of him that stayed there.
She seemed to sense his reluctance to go over it again and backed off. The pair of them continued to walk until Ethan lead them over to a particular sand bank, a little way away from the steps that led up to the boardwalk. "Recognise this place?" He asked her, a cheeky grin returning to his face.
"Should I?" she said, confusedly looking around at the unremarkable little spot, as if expecting a great secret to reveal itself at her cursory inspection.
"This is the place where you first agreed to go out with me." He told her, spreading his arms apart grandly.
"Wait, I thought that was at HQ, when I made you agree to go to that school with me to read stories to children?" was the befuddled response. He wagged a finger in her face, shaking his head emphatically.
"Nu uh uh, you told me you might agree to go out with me if I did that, but you didn't agree to get coffee with me until about 2 weeks after that." Looking at her blank face he pouted a little "Remember, it was early September, a bright sunny day, lots of people about enjoying the last of the good weather, we were fighting Oni Lee…"
"Wait, that doesn't count, I thought you were bleeding out when you asked me." She interjected hotly.
"Of course, it counts, why do you think I let him stab me?"
"Are you telling me you let a psychopath stab you in the leg because you thought it would give you a better chance of a date with me?" Her voice rose to be a little shrill at the end of that sentence, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was saying.
"Well, it worked didn't it?" he shot back.
She turned her back to him, throwing her hands up in the air as she said, "You are unbelievable."
While her back was turned, he fumbled for the box in his back pocket. Moving silently, he drew it out, letting his fingers trace across the engraved metal, before slipping into the grooves of the catch. Flicking the latch aside he gently prised it open, taking great care to make no sudden movements, so he didn't spill its contents onto the sand. As the moonlight played across the white metal band inside, and the stars reflected off the small cluster of stones set through it, he gently lowered himself down onto one knew and waited for her to turn around.
This chapter was fun to write, Ethan I felt came pretty naturally to me, it was Piggot and Battery that I struggled with. I now understand why so many fic writers complain about having to write the Director, anything other than POV from her is remarkably tricky to balance.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter, please let me know what you think about my second Interlude. Regular chapter next time, after that one I may take a short hiatus to prepare for some big job interviews in the middle of June.
Edit: minor grammar corrections
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PrognosticHannya
Far Too Enthusiastic About Etymology
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh my god this adorable dork
Piggot is hard to write because you gotta mix the bigot, the effective, and the political of her
Excellent chapter!
Excellent chapter!
Is there a list of stuff she has made?
"Anti-thinker technology" could make sense if she has made a Ring Of Mind Shielding, which is within her capabilities at the moment. I don't remember her having done so though.
Is she capable of using the 3.5e custom magic item rules? Among other things, they let you combine magic items, like make a ring that acts as both a Ring Of Invisibility and also a Ring Of Sustenance. It's more expensive and time-consuming than making each item separately, but usually not by very much.
The "no tinkertech" part could make sense given her non-technological basis. The "information warfare" part could *almost* make sense given her ring of invisibility and some other things she is capable of making.
"Anti-thinker technology" could make sense if she has made a Ring Of Mind Shielding, which is within her capabilities at the moment. I don't remember her having done so though.
Is she capable of using the 3.5e custom magic item rules? Among other things, they let you combine magic items, like make a ring that acts as both a Ring Of Invisibility and also a Ring Of Sustenance. It's more expensive and time-consuming than making each item separately, but usually not by very much.
Dragonmaster150
Firstborn of Dragonkind
- Location
- Dragendolan: Land of the Dragon Kings
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Considering that she's added at least both Invisibility and Jump to her mother's wedding band I'd say that she probably can.
Fabled Webs
Lord Weaver, Glorious and Wise
- Location
- Arlington, VA
Please separate different speakers into different paragraphs.
- Location
- New Zealand
A great look at Assault and how he lives with his power. Using a high pressure shower to drown himself in information the way Taylor would throw herself into her bugs is a nice touch.
Though you have a couple of cases where you change speaker inside the paragraph.
Though you have a couple of cases where you change speaker inside the paragraph.
Remember needs to be capitalised.
- Pronouns
- Mr
Thank you for the new chapters.
Often I am in anticipation of the tinkering sections of a fic. Perhaps the "oh new shiny toys" syndrome.
However when there are too many tinkering sections that occur in one go, then the tinkering sections and the achievements of the protect become meaningless.
So the other sections and POV gives meaning and fill out the story. It gives the consequence of actions.. that what happens without the hero's presence still matter in its own way.
You don't often see the perspective of Ethan, who is often the comic relief of a story.
I like how you gave more depth to the character (trauma and fear, hope and relief).
Thank you for this wonderful fic. I wonder where it goes.
Often I am in anticipation of the tinkering sections of a fic. Perhaps the "oh new shiny toys" syndrome.
However when there are too many tinkering sections that occur in one go, then the tinkering sections and the achievements of the protect become meaningless.
So the other sections and POV gives meaning and fill out the story. It gives the consequence of actions.. that what happens without the hero's presence still matter in its own way.
You don't often see the perspective of Ethan, who is often the comic relief of a story.
I like how you gave more depth to the character (trauma and fear, hope and relief).
Thank you for this wonderful fic. I wonder where it goes.
Are you thinking of Obdurium? Its a 3.0 item that im not sure made the jump to 3.5
This is a little hint of something that will be revealed later, there is some more going on here in terms of the thinkers reaction.
She has added mind-shielding to her fathers wedding ring
And she is absorbing the increased cost of layering enchantments on the same object at least partly by limiting who can use them to 'creator' essentially choosing to create a flawed item for lower cost.
I get the desire to see whats been made, its a large draw of tinker fics, im very happy you think im getting the balance right between tinkering and plot/characterisation
Im really glad you enjoyed my take on Ethan, I wanted to write something i hadnt seen before, and also give more of an insight into an often overlooked character.
You are very welcome, im enjoying writing it and reading peoples reactions.
- Location
- Massachussetts
That was a surprisingly sweet chapter with an impressively deep representation of Ethan. The characterization by way of the shower's interaction with his powers and the rough sketch of his trigger were both very well done.
I'll start by saying that I very much enjoyed this version, where he is consciously trying to change and where he puts so much stock into his probationary status. The way he's obviously tied that to his own marriageability makes the relationship with Claire feel more real.
Unfortunately for me, reading this chapter was also a pretty dissonant experience for me. I've largely adopted as headcanon the manipulative jerk version who appears in Mixed Feelings, so seeing this kinder and more empathetic person wearing his name felt very strange. That's obviously on me, though, not you.
Separate from that, I also quite liked how much personality Claire's haircut added to her. Very nice touch.
I'll start by saying that I very much enjoyed this version, where he is consciously trying to change and where he puts so much stock into his probationary status. The way he's obviously tied that to his own marriageability makes the relationship with Claire feel more real.
Unfortunately for me, reading this chapter was also a pretty dissonant experience for me. I've largely adopted as headcanon the manipulative jerk version who appears in Mixed Feelings, so seeing this kinder and more empathetic person wearing his name felt very strange. That's obviously on me, though, not you.
Separate from that, I also quite liked how much personality Claire's haircut added to her. Very nice touch.
You skipped showing this part of the meeting? I am very sad about this.
I enjoy Armsmaster thinking that if someone isn't as optimally planned on their first outing as he is, then that means they must not have full control of their abilities.
To be honest, non thinkers should probably have been able to start thinking in that direction too. Assault managed to have a friendly 15 minute conversation with what appears to be a new trigger on her first outing, that included her showing some of her abilities to him. If they have someone who already has a positive connection to a new cape, they are probably one of the best people to continue working with them.
You did a good job of showing how Assault's trigger trauma is still present in his life, while also shows how he is working to cope with it. I don't think I have seen many stories that actually work to weave that in to the narrative. I also haven't seen many stories that really dig into Assault's trigger and related issues. There is one other one that I remember has him comment something along the lines of "Most people don't ask themselves why someone with a brute/mover ability would immediately start working on prison breaks, and just accept the surface reason of 'money'", but they didn't really go into too much more detail (I don't remember which story that was though).
On the topic of recruiting Rebecca, the PRT is definitely going to have some trouble with that. In addition to her meta knowledge possibly warning her away, the biggest problem is that joining the PRT would most likely leave her community more vulnerable than if she stays independent and focuses on the Empire and protecting her community. She started going out partly to protect the Jewish community in Brockton Bay. If she joined the PRT, she would be less active, not as focused on the Empire, and it is highly unlikely that the PRT would have the resources to increase the level of protection given to the Jewish community. Really, the only real plus to joining the Wards for her goals is that if the Empire does end up attacking her family or her synagogue while she is there, it will likely produce a major response because they attacked a ward's family even if they did it unknowingly (assuming the PRT doesn't just try to ship her to another city for safety).
It's odd to think that this cinnamon roll of a tinker actually has something in common with Sophia. They both want to focus on the Empire and joining the Wards would hinder their fight against the E88.
I can't wait till Abby makes a Ring of Sustenance. Then she can sell one to Armsmaster for an insane amount of money and resources.
Pride
Uncle Jamie's apartment was small. Tucked away in a tower block in downtown Brocton Bay, it boasted an excellent view over the boardwalk from the kitchen window. The four of us stood a little awkwardly, still wearing our coats and shoes while Uncle Jamie scurried about the place wearing a frazzled expression as he shoved boxes to the side and cleared chairs of all the detritus that accumulates when you live alone.
We had been invited around for dinner to celebrate Uncle Saul being cleared by his doctor to return to work. They were apparently a little puzzled by his rapid recovery and had warned him not to overstrain himself, but otherwise said that he was recovering well. Aunt Edie had wanted to book a restaurant but Uncle Saul argued against it, saying he would much prefer something smaller with just family.
After an uncomfortable five minutes of feeling like I was constantly in the way, Uncle Jamie at last cleared enough space around his small dining table for us to sit down and had created a space for us to place our coats and shoes.
"So, how is work going? Any interesting projects recently?" Uncle Saul asked his brother once everyone was settled round the table.
"It's ok Saul, we both know you don't understand what I do for a living. There is no need to pretend you are interested now," was Uncle Jamie's reply, delivered with a wry smile as he expertly popped the cork from bottle of wine and started to pour the rich red liquid into the three glasses on the table, The glugging of the bottle drowned out Uncle's Saul's feeble protests.
I sipped my own glass of grape juice contemplatively for a second, before asking "What do you do for work Uncle Jamie?" He turned to me and I was able to make out the faint marks of mostly faded bruises that mottled his jaw and chin—his own legacy of the attack still evident on his face if you knew where to look. He seemed to notice my attention and I saw his right-hand flutter reflexively in response, two of the fingers still splinted together.
"I work in finance Becky. Specifically, I have a financial security consulting business. Banks, and sometimes wealthy clients, pay me to make sure their money and their investments are safe." I noticed out of the corner of my eye Charlotte was mouthing something, turning slightly to get a better view I saw her face had drained slightly and a look of slight horror had appeared. Reading her lips; she seemed to be begging me not to let him go into any more details.
My Aunt must have noticed Charlotte's impassioned plea as well, because she cut off Uncle Jamie before he could launch any deeper into an explanation. "Did you need a hand with dinner at all Jamie or is everything handled?" she said pointedly. I spotted my cousin sigh in relief at being spared a lecture on the intricacies and vulnerabilities of global banking.
"Actually, if you two don't mind? I could do with a hand…" My Uncle trailed off looking at his brother and sister-in-law expectantly, when they nodded in acquiescence he leapt up from table and started gathering ingredients and piling them onto chopping boards which he placed on the table. Uncle Saul looked a little dismayed at the pile of carrots placed in front of him, and I saw him glancing my way surreptitiously. Before he could palm off any of the food preparation duties to myself or Charlotte, Uncle Jamie turned to my cousin and said, "Did you want to take Becky to the Library? I have some new books you might be interested in."
"I suppose I could be persuaded to borrow a book," she replied with a bright smile.
"Just the one? I am shocked! Who are you and what have you done with my niece?" Uncle Jamie joked back at her.
Blushing when she couldn't think of a witty response, my cousin jumped up from the table and grabbed my hand, pulling me from my chair and dragging me through the narrow corridors of the apartment. Heading up the stairs past framed photographs and narrowly avoiding knocking over a potted plant which sat on a white windowsill, she pulled me with all the force of a steam train, and I was dragged helplessly along in her wake. When we got to our destination—a plain brown wooden door with a brass doorknob—she stopped. With a slow, almost reverential movement, she reached out and turned the handle, pushing the door open with a slight creak.
With the door now open, I could see why they called this room the Library. Every surface of this room was covered in books. The desk set out underneath the wide window opposite the door had books stacked on it, under it and next to it. Shelves lined every wall, including under and above the window, and each one was crammed with books to the point of bursting. One shelf sagged slightly under the weight of the heavy volumes arrayed upon it, but was supported from beneath by a staggering tower of tomes. Whether that was intentional it was hard to say, but the result was that the avalanche looked to be diverted for now.
Picking my way through the mess, I was struck by the overwhelmingly musty smell of paper and ink. It hung in the air, coiling about the space like a serpent. I found, hidden amongst the books, two armchairs. One was set next to the desk (which had its own office chair in front of it that was also covered in books, and therefore impossible to sit in). There was a small stand next to it, shaped like a raven in flight, on which lay an open book with scraps of paper wedged in the spine at various points to mark places of interest. A small LED lamp was clipped to the back of the chair to provide a flexible reading light. When I flicked the switch on and looked at the book, I saw it was titled Wrestling with God and Men.
Charlotte made her way through the mess with purposeful air of someone who had made the journey a thousand times before. She slumped down into the second armchair, which appeared to have its own built-in bookshelf in the arms and seat, before rooting around in the piles around her. She started pulling out books, giving them cursory glances, passing judgement and then sorting them into piles based on some unknown criteria.
I wasn't sure if there was an order to the chaos around me, some impossible to comprehend filing system may have been in place, but it looked like books were thrown onto shelves almost at random. I appeared to be standing in a collection of non-fiction books about Judaism. I saw several titles like Torah Queeries, Branded by the Pink Triangle and a Rainbow Thread before my eyes were overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of titles to look through.
Unsure where to begin, I just started pulling books off the shelves at random. I found a copy of Dune next to a treatise on Napoleonic era naval tactics, I flicked idly through a dog-eared paperback of The Invisible Man that I found wedged inside a book on ancient Roman metallurgy techniques. After a little while, I settled in the chair with a large, illustrated hardback book of Greek myths and legends.
The armchair was extraordinarily comfortable, once I had removed the small collection of paperbacks that had fallen down the crack between the cushion and the backrest, and I enjoyed myself reading how Perseus slayed Medusa as the faint babble of my family talking drifted through the open doorway from downstairs. Occasionally, I was disturbed by the sound of falling books, as my cousin sifted through the stacks, searching for the perfect novel.
After an hour or so, I glanced up from my book to see Charlotte curled up around a book, one leg hanging nonchalantly off the armrest and swinging slightly as she turned the pages. I caught a glimpse of the title as she shifted slightly, trying to get more comfortable.
"Haven't you read that one before?" I asked, gesturing at the crime/thriller novel she had clutched in her hands.
"Hmm? I mean yes, but it's better second time around." She responded distractedly, idly turning another page and smoothing out a folded down corner without looking up at me.
"How is better? Surely you know what's going to happen, so the suspense is gone?" I asked, curious and a little bewildered now.
"Exactly!" She said, waving a hand slightly in my general direction as if to emphasis her point. "I know what's going to happen, so now I get to look for all the little clues I missed the first-time round, without having to push through to find out what happens."
"I still think it's weird you picked up a book you've read before, when there are so many different books in here to choose from," I teased good-naturedly from across the room.
"Too much choice makes it hard to decide. Besides, it's not just me, how many different books have you read about Greek mythology now?"
"It's not the same, each book is different at least, even if the stories are the same." I deflected, mentally filing away my unknown interest in the classics for later examination.
Something in my voice must have given some of my uncertainty away, as Charlotte gave me a long look as she pulled loose the knot she had wound herself into and straightened up in her seat to look at me. She opened her mouth to say something, a serious expression on her face, when we were interrupted from our bickering by my aunt calling us for dinner.
Jumping to my feet, the heavy book falling out of my lap and clattering to the floor with a heavy thud, I raced out of the room. Eager to avoid whatever insight my cousin may have been about to speak and hoping that it was lost and forgotten in the chatter and bustle of the meal.
*** *** ***
I climbed sluggishly out of the taxi after it rolled to a stop outside our house. I heard the sound of a slamming door from the far side of the car and turned to see my cousin waddle into her view, her hands resting on her stomach as she moaned piteously.
"I feel like I'm about to explode," she complained as we walked down the drive ahead of her parents, who were searching through pockets for the cab fare.
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have eaten so much then." I said, poking her gently in the side. This elicited a yelp as she scrambled to get away from my outstretched fingers.
"Stop that, you'll make me sick," she groaned. "Besides, I saw you eat just as much as I did, why aren't you suffering like I am?"
"Superior genetics?" I answered, feigning an air of nobility by raising my chin and sticking my nose in the air.
"We are literally cousins," Charlotte snapped back at, giving me a gentle push that caused me to nearly stumble into a rose bush.
"Well maybe it's because I exercise more than you," I said as I carefully pulled thorns out of my jacket in an attempt to avoid being pricked.
"We are together at practically all hours of the day and I have never once seen you do any exercise you didn't have to," was the sardonic response.
We bickered a little longer and by the time my aunt and uncle made their way unsteadily up the drive to unlock the door to the house we had settled into a truce. I would stop poking her belly, and she would stop accusing me of making a satanic pact to be able to eat whatever I wanted and not get fat or bloated. It was a good compromise.
After being let into the house, we had barely gotten our shoes and coats off before my aunt hurried us upstairs with reminders that it was a school night and we should be getting ready for bed. Charlotte and I shared an exasperated eye roll. I decided to slip upstairs and get first dibs on the bathroom while my cousin tried to argue that this whole dinner thing was their idea, not ours and that we couldn't be blamed for the lateness of the hour.
I brushed my teeth and washed my face, wincing on my cousin's behalf as I listened to the rather loud argument that ensued downstairs. It was thankfully brief, as I was just finishing getting into my pyjamas and had started heading back to my bedroom as the shouting finished. Charlotte came stomping up the stairs shortly after and I heard her slamming her bedroom door closed after a lightning quick bathroom visit.
Alone in my room, I checked under my pillow, making sure the small glass vial I had placed there earlier was where I left it. That vial was my remedy for all those sleepless nights. It wasn't perfect, but after too many days spent in a daze, and too many near misses and slip-ups, I had focused on finding something, anything that could help me patrol the streets and still perform at school. Or at least not draw any more attention to myself by walking into doors.
The blue-violet liquid was my answer, an alchemical solution that could effectively reduce the amount of sleep I needed by half, making me feel as well rested after four or five hours as I would usually after ten. I only had a week's worth of them left, as crafting them had completely wiped out what little remaining stock of chemicals I had. Even so, it was worth it to not feel like a zombie the morning after a night in costume.
While I waited for the house to settle into its now familiar state of rest, I checked my phone for any updates on my objective for this evening. There was no change there, so I was left to wait, anxiously watching the minutes tick by until at last it was time to kick off my covers and steal away into the night.
*** *** ***
I sat on the rooftop, the cold concrete underneath me sapping the warmth out of me and leaving me feeling a little numb and uncomfortable in the hazy fog that clung to the rooftops in the early April night. I fidgeted slightly as I waited, trying to suppress my nervousness and surreptitiously massage some life back into my legs.
I was on top of a small office building in the rougher part of the docks. I had checked it out online earlier this week; apparently it had been abandoned after the local insurance firm it had housed went bust about three years ago. Since then it had seen a steady stream of squatters move in and trash the place before getting kicked out by the police. As I had climbed up, I had looked through cracked windows at the blackened husks of campfires made out of broken wooden desks, stripped back walls that had been gutted for electrical wiring, and makeshift beds formed from office chairs and fire blankets.
As far as I could tell it was currently empty and had been for some time. The buildings around me didn't look like they had fared any better when the neighbourhood went into decline. A few had the tell-tale flicker of firelight behind ragged curtains, but most stood empty. Looming monuments to the grim economic prospects of the city. It was a sobering contrast to the bright, steam-cleaned brickwork of the apartment block Uncle Jamie lived in, or even the ragged but charming houses around where I lived.
Looking out over the city from this perspective it was hard to imagine there was anything better out there. The damage was omnipresent and oppressive, almost seeming to mock the very idea of hopes and dreams. It was practically a different world, one that chewed people up and spat them back out again to crawl in the gutter and scrabble for the meanest scraps in order to survive.
Standing up, I looked over the broken lip of the roof to peer into the darkness below. I stood there, a hundred feet up, stretching my legs as I watched a lone figure shamble down the street. They limped along behind a purloined shopping cart filled with trash bags, their threadbare coat pulled tight around their body, their patchy hair spilling out from underneath a woollen cap that was far cleaner than the rest of their outfit. My fingers nervously played over some of my equipment as they trundled down an alley and out of sight. Sighing, I reached my arms upwards to stretch, feeling my back click slightly from the cold and my poor posture from how I had been sitting whilst I waited.
Moving away from the edge of the building I found the old air conditioning unit near the centre of the roof. It had long ago been gutted of anything valuable, and was now just a rusting metal shell that worked as a convenient windbreak. I Drew my latest creation, a dagger, from its sheath on my belt and tested the edge against the red-brown metal, marvelling as the enchanted blade peeled away strips with the barest of pressure.
The dagger was an addition to my arsenal I was still conflicted about. It was about six inches long and made from my newest metal (which I had decided to call Adamantine after the mythical metal that Perseus's sword was made from, gifted to him by Zeus). The thin blade was sharp on both sides and came to a wicked point at the top. There was a small groove in the blade to reduce the weight, as adamantine was heavier than Mithril, before it reached a large cross guard and a leather wrapped hilt. I had to steal another belt to source the leather. My uncle was starting to run out, so if I wanted any more I would have to buy it myself. All along the edge of the blade I had carefully scribed runes that I had filled with Mithril, making the blade stronger and sharper and resistant to the passage of time.
As demonstrated by the now shredded air conditioning unit, the blade seemed to be able to cut through any material. I'd tested it on miscellaneous items I had dug out of my uncle's garage, and a small pile of cleanly sliced pieces currently littered my workshop's floor back home. I had even managed to cut through some of my diminishing stocks of Mithril bars as cleanly as I did steel, though it struggled with anything I had enchanted, which reassured me slightly in case my own weapons were ever turned against me. I had just enough Adamantine left after crafting my crossbow and this blade to build a small number of finely made tools that would make it far easier to work with difficult materials in the future.
The usefulness of a tool that could cut through anything was not lost on me. I didn't need to carry lockpicks or acid now. Anywhere was open to me as long as the material was thinner than the length of my blade. But it was more than a little terrifying to carry such a dangerous weapon around with me. I didn't know what its effect would be on flesh and bone; I really didn't want to find out either. But I knew, the longer I carried it, the more likely I was to find myself in a situation where I used it on a human being.
I had avoided making any more of the metal since I ran out, focusing my rapidly dwindling chemical supplies on the sedative mixture for my darts and the rejuvenating mix that aided my sleep. I didn't want the temptation of making more Adamantine weapons. Though I had considered tipping my darts with it to make them armour piercing, the concept was just too dangerous.
It was a troubling aspect of my power, how so much of it was clearly designed not just for open warfare, but for creating highly effective and efficient ways to kill. I had been aware of this for a while. A lot of my incomplete schematics were for swords or spears that did incredible things, all of which would invariably result in people losing their internal organs. But it had really struck home when I was trying to turn the sleep gas into a sedative I could use to dose my darts. After five different attempts to come up with an alchemical formula, all of which would have been highly effective if what I wanted at the end of the day was a corpse, I realised that my power was not really in the business of taking people alive.
The poisons I had created were terrifying in their variety. The first would have rendered people unable to move by weakening their muscles as if they had fully atrophied. A clever solution, until I realised it affected all muscles in the body, including the lungs and the heart. Another one had worked by fogging the mind, affecting cognition and thought to slow a person. I thought that might be usable until I did some research on the brain and worked out what exactly my drug was doing. I ended up destroying that batch; I invented an alchemical napalm-like grenade to burn it to ash. Under no circumstances was I going to weaponize dementia.
Not all of my items were designed for killing. I had schematics for some truly wonderous things that I was looking forward to one day completing. I wasn't sure if was possible to use a backpack that contained a pocket dimension as a weapon but it seemed unlikely. So combat clearly wasn't the sole focus of my power. Just a major part of it.
I wondered if other powers were the same. Did other tinkers despair over the lack of non-combat uses for their power? Or was that just me? I knew that parahuman healers were incredibly rare, as I had discovered it after making my healing belt. I had started researching if there was a way to make some money healing at a hospital or for the PRT, trying to find an easy and legal way to put money into my tinkering budget.
I had quickly nixed the idea. Apparently every parahuman healer that had appeared in the United States in the past five years (all seven of them) had either joined the Protectorate, been kidnapped, or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Assault's handy guide to starting out as a parahuman that he had linked me to even had a section on what to do if your power allowed you to heal people. Depressingly, its recommendation was to keep that information to yourself unless you were part of an established team, planning to join the Protectorate, or there was a Truce in effect.
The rest of the guide had actually been rather useful, with some basic information on how to source resources without attracting attention from the gangs. Its number one recommendation was that you buy from the PRT, but if you didn't want to do that it still gave some useful pointers. There was stuff in there about ways to keep your identity secret, as well as a run-down on the unwritten rules of engagement that had arisen around cape culture over the past fifteen years or so. This was followed by a point by point deconstruction of said rules that had clearly been added by Assault. It was an enlightening, though disheartening, read.
Tonight, I was freezing my butt off on the roof of this abandoned building because I was following another piece of advice from Assault. Over the last week or so I had started reaching out to other independent capes. I wasn't particularly keen on the idea of a team up, unless the cape in question was willing to go along with my plans to de-stabilise the Empire, but it was apparently very important for another reason. Being known in the local cape community was one of the most effective ways to avoid disappearing under mysterious circumstances (that phrase was used so often in the guide it had its own acronym) or fatal injury. Reputation was important, and established independent capes had been known to band together against larger groups if too many of them dropped out of contact.
Unfortunately, it turns out that trying to set up meetings with capes as an unknown is incredibly difficult. There is a sort of catch-twenty-two situation where you need to be well established to get people to take you seriously, but you can't get established until they take you seriously. I had created several throw-away PHO accounts and trawled message boards; I had left notes at a couple of drop-spots that Assault had highlighted in his welcome pack and so far, I had come up with exactly nothing.
That wasn't to say I hadn't seen any other independents. Slipwing had flown over my head three nights ago, and completely ignored me when I tried to flag her down. Lignin had left a note agreeing to meet up with me last week, and then failed to show up and had gone completely silent. Balisong hadn't responded to my messages and Vigil had accused me of being a plant by the ABB to get him out of hiding.
Only one other had agreed to meet me, and she was forty-five minutes late.
I put my dagger away and pulled out my burner phone to check the time. The harsh green light illuminating the space, reflecting off of the fog and casting hazy shadows onto the metal behind me as I tapped out an emergency message in case something went wrong. As I was writing, a piece of shadow detached itself from the greater mass that boiled around me in the night sky and formed into something roughly person shaped about twenty feet away from me.
"You should pay better attention to your surroundings."
The voice of a young girl filtered through the fog, disguised slightly by a poor attempt to growl the words at a lower octave. They still surprised me, causing me to jump, spinning around to face where the voice came from. The phone slipped from my hands to clatter against the floor as I unhooked my crossbow from my belt in a motion far smoother than I had ever done in practice. The contraption unfolded in my hands, the draw winching back automatically as it did so. I dropped a dart into the feed from one of the small cases I had strapped to my right forearm and pointed it at the figure.
As the wind shifted, the fog cleared slightly and I could see a girl, maybe five or six inches taller than me, wearing a heavy black cloak over a rough body suit that clung to her skin. Strapped over this she had black metal guards on her knees and arms, as well as some kind of reinforced metal gloves on her hands. There was a heavy looking tool belt around her waist that had been repurposed to carry a pair of crossbows that looked similar to my own, though far lower in quality. She was wearing a modified hockey mask over her face, the pale white mask looked clipped to the inside of her hood like mine and gave a ghostly quality to her appearance as she flickered between solid and semi-solid while standing in the mists.
"You've got decent reflexes though; I'll give you that."
I heard her voice drift through the night air towards me. The words were encouraging, but there was an overall tone of condescension as she watched me. I suddenly felt a little on display as she ran her eyes over my costume, and I could almost sense the sneer that was forming underneath her mask. Aside from some crossover in in the shape of our outfits and the crossbows we used, I don't know that we could have appeared any more different and I could tell she did not care for the brightness of my costume.
I lowered the bow, ejecting the dart back into its case and letting it fold back up again, before replacing it on my belt. Raising my hand to show I was now unarmed I waved at the vigilante in front of me and said, "Hi, you're Shadow Stalker, right?" My voice quavered a little with nerves. I wasn't sure why, but this felt far more difficult than shooting at gang members.
The dark clad figure snorted. "Yeah that's me. What are you calling yourself? Princess? Sparkles? Rhinestone maybe?" There was acid in her voice as she spoke. I didn't think I had done anything to really annoy her, I had pointed my crossbow at her, but she was a vigilante, so she must be used to that. I decided to ignore the jibes and try and be open with her in the hope that I could defuse things.
"I haven't decided on a name yet, though I think the PRT are calling me Sprite." I replied, as calmly as possible. She responded with a casual wave of her hand as she leaned up against the crumbling wall at the lip of the building.
"Don't let the PRT decide your name, it's weak, lets them think they own you. Pick your own, and make sure you do it before the idiots online get a chance to do it," she snarled at me from where she stood, now leaning up against the broken wall at the edge of the roof. From her tone of voice I was half convinced that she was going to draw one of her weapons and shoot me at a moment's notice.
"Ok…" I drew the word out, trying to bridge the gaps in this conversation as I struggled for words. "I asked to meet you tonight because…"
"Yeah, I don't really care," she interrupted me, shifting so that she was crouched down on the wall now, instead of leaning against it. Her pale mask stark against her barely visible body as she stared across the roof at me. "I only really came because I was curious, and I was going hunting round here anyway."
"You aren't interested in getting back up?" I asked, confused.
"Why bother? You will be dead in a couple of weeks, anyway. New capes don't last long in Brockton." Was the chilling reply.
"I was thinking we could have each other's backs; I could make you gear, and you could watch out for me while I get up to speed." I said neutrally, trying not to lash out at the blunt declaration of my imminent demise.
"No point really, once you bite it I would be left holding onto a bunch of broken gear and you wouldn't be around to fix it. Better to not get used to having anything that unreliable. I don't want to get killed because your shitty tinker-tech broke at the wrong moment." The words were spoken casually, but there was a weight of judgement behind them, like she had seen enough of me to decide that there was no hope for me, and it wasn't worth it to get invested. For a moment I was tempted to tell her that my stuff doesn't break, but what would be the point. It's not like she would believe me, clearly she had decided I was unworthy before I even opened my mouth.
"What the hell gives you the right to judge me like that?" I bit back angrily. I could feel the heat of my breath against the silk in front of my face, my heart was beating fast in my chest as my blood pounded in my ears.
"Listen Sparkles, I've been doing this for two years," she said heatedly. She didn't seem to like my aggression, but I didn't really care at this point. "And every wannabe hero that hits the streets eventually winds up face down in the gutter. You haven't given me any reason to think you would be any different." She gestured in my general direction "If you make it past six months then I might change my mind. But odds are, you just aren't worth my time."
"Because you are so much better than me, going two years and still spending all of your time sniping at drug addicts and drunks who can't fight back. At least some of us are trying to make a difference." I had done my research on Shadow Stalker. Apparently she was incredibly violent but stuck to taking out Merchants and low level members of the ABB and Empire.
She bristled at my words as they clearly struck a nerve. One hand drifted down, reaching for the handle of her crossbow for a moment. She stopped herself as she saw me shifting my stance to make it easier to grab my own weapons, and instead she clenched her hand into a fist and turned away to look out over the night sky.
"If I have to explain to you why it's better to be alive and taking out the trash, instead of getting myself killed picking a fight I can't win, then I severely overestimated how long you are going to be sticking around." Before I could say anything to that, she stood up. Her cloak billowed a little as she stood on the wall, straightening her back so that she cut through the fog like a knife. "Anyway, I've got places to be. Later, Sparkles."
With that she kicked away from the roof, and as she twisted in the air and started to fall her body shifted. It went completely immaterial, an opaque shadow indistinguishable from the dark sky around it. I could barely see the outline of her mask under her hood, looking almost skull-like as she dropped slowly away, drifting towards the nearby rooftop as she was carried by the wind.
As she disappeared out of sight, I was left once more to myself, seething on the top of an abandoned building.
Thanks go to the wonderful ccstat for beta reading this chapter, you deserve a cookie.
As I said last update, I'm going to take a short hiatus as I have two massive job interviews next week that I really have not done enough preparation for yet. The next chapter is already written (it was originally part of this one but it would have come in at around 11000 words and there was a natural break, so I split them up) but I won't start editing it until after my interviews. It should be ready fairly soon after that though.
Hope you enjoyed this chapter, let me know what you think and have a wonderful pride month ( this chapter was actually written and named well before I realised it was pride month, sometimes things just work out I guess)
We had been invited around for dinner to celebrate Uncle Saul being cleared by his doctor to return to work. They were apparently a little puzzled by his rapid recovery and had warned him not to overstrain himself, but otherwise said that he was recovering well. Aunt Edie had wanted to book a restaurant but Uncle Saul argued against it, saying he would much prefer something smaller with just family.
After an uncomfortable five minutes of feeling like I was constantly in the way, Uncle Jamie at last cleared enough space around his small dining table for us to sit down and had created a space for us to place our coats and shoes.
"So, how is work going? Any interesting projects recently?" Uncle Saul asked his brother once everyone was settled round the table.
"It's ok Saul, we both know you don't understand what I do for a living. There is no need to pretend you are interested now," was Uncle Jamie's reply, delivered with a wry smile as he expertly popped the cork from bottle of wine and started to pour the rich red liquid into the three glasses on the table, The glugging of the bottle drowned out Uncle's Saul's feeble protests.
I sipped my own glass of grape juice contemplatively for a second, before asking "What do you do for work Uncle Jamie?" He turned to me and I was able to make out the faint marks of mostly faded bruises that mottled his jaw and chin—his own legacy of the attack still evident on his face if you knew where to look. He seemed to notice my attention and I saw his right-hand flutter reflexively in response, two of the fingers still splinted together.
"I work in finance Becky. Specifically, I have a financial security consulting business. Banks, and sometimes wealthy clients, pay me to make sure their money and their investments are safe." I noticed out of the corner of my eye Charlotte was mouthing something, turning slightly to get a better view I saw her face had drained slightly and a look of slight horror had appeared. Reading her lips; she seemed to be begging me not to let him go into any more details.
My Aunt must have noticed Charlotte's impassioned plea as well, because she cut off Uncle Jamie before he could launch any deeper into an explanation. "Did you need a hand with dinner at all Jamie or is everything handled?" she said pointedly. I spotted my cousin sigh in relief at being spared a lecture on the intricacies and vulnerabilities of global banking.
"Actually, if you two don't mind? I could do with a hand…" My Uncle trailed off looking at his brother and sister-in-law expectantly, when they nodded in acquiescence he leapt up from table and started gathering ingredients and piling them onto chopping boards which he placed on the table. Uncle Saul looked a little dismayed at the pile of carrots placed in front of him, and I saw him glancing my way surreptitiously. Before he could palm off any of the food preparation duties to myself or Charlotte, Uncle Jamie turned to my cousin and said, "Did you want to take Becky to the Library? I have some new books you might be interested in."
"I suppose I could be persuaded to borrow a book," she replied with a bright smile.
"Just the one? I am shocked! Who are you and what have you done with my niece?" Uncle Jamie joked back at her.
Blushing when she couldn't think of a witty response, my cousin jumped up from the table and grabbed my hand, pulling me from my chair and dragging me through the narrow corridors of the apartment. Heading up the stairs past framed photographs and narrowly avoiding knocking over a potted plant which sat on a white windowsill, she pulled me with all the force of a steam train, and I was dragged helplessly along in her wake. When we got to our destination—a plain brown wooden door with a brass doorknob—she stopped. With a slow, almost reverential movement, she reached out and turned the handle, pushing the door open with a slight creak.
With the door now open, I could see why they called this room the Library. Every surface of this room was covered in books. The desk set out underneath the wide window opposite the door had books stacked on it, under it and next to it. Shelves lined every wall, including under and above the window, and each one was crammed with books to the point of bursting. One shelf sagged slightly under the weight of the heavy volumes arrayed upon it, but was supported from beneath by a staggering tower of tomes. Whether that was intentional it was hard to say, but the result was that the avalanche looked to be diverted for now.
Picking my way through the mess, I was struck by the overwhelmingly musty smell of paper and ink. It hung in the air, coiling about the space like a serpent. I found, hidden amongst the books, two armchairs. One was set next to the desk (which had its own office chair in front of it that was also covered in books, and therefore impossible to sit in). There was a small stand next to it, shaped like a raven in flight, on which lay an open book with scraps of paper wedged in the spine at various points to mark places of interest. A small LED lamp was clipped to the back of the chair to provide a flexible reading light. When I flicked the switch on and looked at the book, I saw it was titled Wrestling with God and Men.
Charlotte made her way through the mess with purposeful air of someone who had made the journey a thousand times before. She slumped down into the second armchair, which appeared to have its own built-in bookshelf in the arms and seat, before rooting around in the piles around her. She started pulling out books, giving them cursory glances, passing judgement and then sorting them into piles based on some unknown criteria.
I wasn't sure if there was an order to the chaos around me, some impossible to comprehend filing system may have been in place, but it looked like books were thrown onto shelves almost at random. I appeared to be standing in a collection of non-fiction books about Judaism. I saw several titles like Torah Queeries, Branded by the Pink Triangle and a Rainbow Thread before my eyes were overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of titles to look through.
Unsure where to begin, I just started pulling books off the shelves at random. I found a copy of Dune next to a treatise on Napoleonic era naval tactics, I flicked idly through a dog-eared paperback of The Invisible Man that I found wedged inside a book on ancient Roman metallurgy techniques. After a little while, I settled in the chair with a large, illustrated hardback book of Greek myths and legends.
The armchair was extraordinarily comfortable, once I had removed the small collection of paperbacks that had fallen down the crack between the cushion and the backrest, and I enjoyed myself reading how Perseus slayed Medusa as the faint babble of my family talking drifted through the open doorway from downstairs. Occasionally, I was disturbed by the sound of falling books, as my cousin sifted through the stacks, searching for the perfect novel.
After an hour or so, I glanced up from my book to see Charlotte curled up around a book, one leg hanging nonchalantly off the armrest and swinging slightly as she turned the pages. I caught a glimpse of the title as she shifted slightly, trying to get more comfortable.
"Haven't you read that one before?" I asked, gesturing at the crime/thriller novel she had clutched in her hands.
"Hmm? I mean yes, but it's better second time around." She responded distractedly, idly turning another page and smoothing out a folded down corner without looking up at me.
"How is better? Surely you know what's going to happen, so the suspense is gone?" I asked, curious and a little bewildered now.
"Exactly!" She said, waving a hand slightly in my general direction as if to emphasis her point. "I know what's going to happen, so now I get to look for all the little clues I missed the first-time round, without having to push through to find out what happens."
"I still think it's weird you picked up a book you've read before, when there are so many different books in here to choose from," I teased good-naturedly from across the room.
"Too much choice makes it hard to decide. Besides, it's not just me, how many different books have you read about Greek mythology now?"
"It's not the same, each book is different at least, even if the stories are the same." I deflected, mentally filing away my unknown interest in the classics for later examination.
Something in my voice must have given some of my uncertainty away, as Charlotte gave me a long look as she pulled loose the knot she had wound herself into and straightened up in her seat to look at me. She opened her mouth to say something, a serious expression on her face, when we were interrupted from our bickering by my aunt calling us for dinner.
Jumping to my feet, the heavy book falling out of my lap and clattering to the floor with a heavy thud, I raced out of the room. Eager to avoid whatever insight my cousin may have been about to speak and hoping that it was lost and forgotten in the chatter and bustle of the meal.
*** *** ***
I climbed sluggishly out of the taxi after it rolled to a stop outside our house. I heard the sound of a slamming door from the far side of the car and turned to see my cousin waddle into her view, her hands resting on her stomach as she moaned piteously.
"I feel like I'm about to explode," she complained as we walked down the drive ahead of her parents, who were searching through pockets for the cab fare.
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have eaten so much then." I said, poking her gently in the side. This elicited a yelp as she scrambled to get away from my outstretched fingers.
"Stop that, you'll make me sick," she groaned. "Besides, I saw you eat just as much as I did, why aren't you suffering like I am?"
"Superior genetics?" I answered, feigning an air of nobility by raising my chin and sticking my nose in the air.
"We are literally cousins," Charlotte snapped back at, giving me a gentle push that caused me to nearly stumble into a rose bush.
"Well maybe it's because I exercise more than you," I said as I carefully pulled thorns out of my jacket in an attempt to avoid being pricked.
"We are together at practically all hours of the day and I have never once seen you do any exercise you didn't have to," was the sardonic response.
We bickered a little longer and by the time my aunt and uncle made their way unsteadily up the drive to unlock the door to the house we had settled into a truce. I would stop poking her belly, and she would stop accusing me of making a satanic pact to be able to eat whatever I wanted and not get fat or bloated. It was a good compromise.
After being let into the house, we had barely gotten our shoes and coats off before my aunt hurried us upstairs with reminders that it was a school night and we should be getting ready for bed. Charlotte and I shared an exasperated eye roll. I decided to slip upstairs and get first dibs on the bathroom while my cousin tried to argue that this whole dinner thing was their idea, not ours and that we couldn't be blamed for the lateness of the hour.
I brushed my teeth and washed my face, wincing on my cousin's behalf as I listened to the rather loud argument that ensued downstairs. It was thankfully brief, as I was just finishing getting into my pyjamas and had started heading back to my bedroom as the shouting finished. Charlotte came stomping up the stairs shortly after and I heard her slamming her bedroom door closed after a lightning quick bathroom visit.
Alone in my room, I checked under my pillow, making sure the small glass vial I had placed there earlier was where I left it. That vial was my remedy for all those sleepless nights. It wasn't perfect, but after too many days spent in a daze, and too many near misses and slip-ups, I had focused on finding something, anything that could help me patrol the streets and still perform at school. Or at least not draw any more attention to myself by walking into doors.
The blue-violet liquid was my answer, an alchemical solution that could effectively reduce the amount of sleep I needed by half, making me feel as well rested after four or five hours as I would usually after ten. I only had a week's worth of them left, as crafting them had completely wiped out what little remaining stock of chemicals I had. Even so, it was worth it to not feel like a zombie the morning after a night in costume.
While I waited for the house to settle into its now familiar state of rest, I checked my phone for any updates on my objective for this evening. There was no change there, so I was left to wait, anxiously watching the minutes tick by until at last it was time to kick off my covers and steal away into the night.
*** *** ***
I sat on the rooftop, the cold concrete underneath me sapping the warmth out of me and leaving me feeling a little numb and uncomfortable in the hazy fog that clung to the rooftops in the early April night. I fidgeted slightly as I waited, trying to suppress my nervousness and surreptitiously massage some life back into my legs.
I was on top of a small office building in the rougher part of the docks. I had checked it out online earlier this week; apparently it had been abandoned after the local insurance firm it had housed went bust about three years ago. Since then it had seen a steady stream of squatters move in and trash the place before getting kicked out by the police. As I had climbed up, I had looked through cracked windows at the blackened husks of campfires made out of broken wooden desks, stripped back walls that had been gutted for electrical wiring, and makeshift beds formed from office chairs and fire blankets.
As far as I could tell it was currently empty and had been for some time. The buildings around me didn't look like they had fared any better when the neighbourhood went into decline. A few had the tell-tale flicker of firelight behind ragged curtains, but most stood empty. Looming monuments to the grim economic prospects of the city. It was a sobering contrast to the bright, steam-cleaned brickwork of the apartment block Uncle Jamie lived in, or even the ragged but charming houses around where I lived.
Looking out over the city from this perspective it was hard to imagine there was anything better out there. The damage was omnipresent and oppressive, almost seeming to mock the very idea of hopes and dreams. It was practically a different world, one that chewed people up and spat them back out again to crawl in the gutter and scrabble for the meanest scraps in order to survive.
Standing up, I looked over the broken lip of the roof to peer into the darkness below. I stood there, a hundred feet up, stretching my legs as I watched a lone figure shamble down the street. They limped along behind a purloined shopping cart filled with trash bags, their threadbare coat pulled tight around their body, their patchy hair spilling out from underneath a woollen cap that was far cleaner than the rest of their outfit. My fingers nervously played over some of my equipment as they trundled down an alley and out of sight. Sighing, I reached my arms upwards to stretch, feeling my back click slightly from the cold and my poor posture from how I had been sitting whilst I waited.
Moving away from the edge of the building I found the old air conditioning unit near the centre of the roof. It had long ago been gutted of anything valuable, and was now just a rusting metal shell that worked as a convenient windbreak. I Drew my latest creation, a dagger, from its sheath on my belt and tested the edge against the red-brown metal, marvelling as the enchanted blade peeled away strips with the barest of pressure.
The dagger was an addition to my arsenal I was still conflicted about. It was about six inches long and made from my newest metal (which I had decided to call Adamantine after the mythical metal that Perseus's sword was made from, gifted to him by Zeus). The thin blade was sharp on both sides and came to a wicked point at the top. There was a small groove in the blade to reduce the weight, as adamantine was heavier than Mithril, before it reached a large cross guard and a leather wrapped hilt. I had to steal another belt to source the leather. My uncle was starting to run out, so if I wanted any more I would have to buy it myself. All along the edge of the blade I had carefully scribed runes that I had filled with Mithril, making the blade stronger and sharper and resistant to the passage of time.
As demonstrated by the now shredded air conditioning unit, the blade seemed to be able to cut through any material. I'd tested it on miscellaneous items I had dug out of my uncle's garage, and a small pile of cleanly sliced pieces currently littered my workshop's floor back home. I had even managed to cut through some of my diminishing stocks of Mithril bars as cleanly as I did steel, though it struggled with anything I had enchanted, which reassured me slightly in case my own weapons were ever turned against me. I had just enough Adamantine left after crafting my crossbow and this blade to build a small number of finely made tools that would make it far easier to work with difficult materials in the future.
The usefulness of a tool that could cut through anything was not lost on me. I didn't need to carry lockpicks or acid now. Anywhere was open to me as long as the material was thinner than the length of my blade. But it was more than a little terrifying to carry such a dangerous weapon around with me. I didn't know what its effect would be on flesh and bone; I really didn't want to find out either. But I knew, the longer I carried it, the more likely I was to find myself in a situation where I used it on a human being.
I had avoided making any more of the metal since I ran out, focusing my rapidly dwindling chemical supplies on the sedative mixture for my darts and the rejuvenating mix that aided my sleep. I didn't want the temptation of making more Adamantine weapons. Though I had considered tipping my darts with it to make them armour piercing, the concept was just too dangerous.
It was a troubling aspect of my power, how so much of it was clearly designed not just for open warfare, but for creating highly effective and efficient ways to kill. I had been aware of this for a while. A lot of my incomplete schematics were for swords or spears that did incredible things, all of which would invariably result in people losing their internal organs. But it had really struck home when I was trying to turn the sleep gas into a sedative I could use to dose my darts. After five different attempts to come up with an alchemical formula, all of which would have been highly effective if what I wanted at the end of the day was a corpse, I realised that my power was not really in the business of taking people alive.
The poisons I had created were terrifying in their variety. The first would have rendered people unable to move by weakening their muscles as if they had fully atrophied. A clever solution, until I realised it affected all muscles in the body, including the lungs and the heart. Another one had worked by fogging the mind, affecting cognition and thought to slow a person. I thought that might be usable until I did some research on the brain and worked out what exactly my drug was doing. I ended up destroying that batch; I invented an alchemical napalm-like grenade to burn it to ash. Under no circumstances was I going to weaponize dementia.
Not all of my items were designed for killing. I had schematics for some truly wonderous things that I was looking forward to one day completing. I wasn't sure if was possible to use a backpack that contained a pocket dimension as a weapon but it seemed unlikely. So combat clearly wasn't the sole focus of my power. Just a major part of it.
I wondered if other powers were the same. Did other tinkers despair over the lack of non-combat uses for their power? Or was that just me? I knew that parahuman healers were incredibly rare, as I had discovered it after making my healing belt. I had started researching if there was a way to make some money healing at a hospital or for the PRT, trying to find an easy and legal way to put money into my tinkering budget.
I had quickly nixed the idea. Apparently every parahuman healer that had appeared in the United States in the past five years (all seven of them) had either joined the Protectorate, been kidnapped, or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Assault's handy guide to starting out as a parahuman that he had linked me to even had a section on what to do if your power allowed you to heal people. Depressingly, its recommendation was to keep that information to yourself unless you were part of an established team, planning to join the Protectorate, or there was a Truce in effect.
The rest of the guide had actually been rather useful, with some basic information on how to source resources without attracting attention from the gangs. Its number one recommendation was that you buy from the PRT, but if you didn't want to do that it still gave some useful pointers. There was stuff in there about ways to keep your identity secret, as well as a run-down on the unwritten rules of engagement that had arisen around cape culture over the past fifteen years or so. This was followed by a point by point deconstruction of said rules that had clearly been added by Assault. It was an enlightening, though disheartening, read.
Tonight, I was freezing my butt off on the roof of this abandoned building because I was following another piece of advice from Assault. Over the last week or so I had started reaching out to other independent capes. I wasn't particularly keen on the idea of a team up, unless the cape in question was willing to go along with my plans to de-stabilise the Empire, but it was apparently very important for another reason. Being known in the local cape community was one of the most effective ways to avoid disappearing under mysterious circumstances (that phrase was used so often in the guide it had its own acronym) or fatal injury. Reputation was important, and established independent capes had been known to band together against larger groups if too many of them dropped out of contact.
Unfortunately, it turns out that trying to set up meetings with capes as an unknown is incredibly difficult. There is a sort of catch-twenty-two situation where you need to be well established to get people to take you seriously, but you can't get established until they take you seriously. I had created several throw-away PHO accounts and trawled message boards; I had left notes at a couple of drop-spots that Assault had highlighted in his welcome pack and so far, I had come up with exactly nothing.
That wasn't to say I hadn't seen any other independents. Slipwing had flown over my head three nights ago, and completely ignored me when I tried to flag her down. Lignin had left a note agreeing to meet up with me last week, and then failed to show up and had gone completely silent. Balisong hadn't responded to my messages and Vigil had accused me of being a plant by the ABB to get him out of hiding.
Only one other had agreed to meet me, and she was forty-five minutes late.
I put my dagger away and pulled out my burner phone to check the time. The harsh green light illuminating the space, reflecting off of the fog and casting hazy shadows onto the metal behind me as I tapped out an emergency message in case something went wrong. As I was writing, a piece of shadow detached itself from the greater mass that boiled around me in the night sky and formed into something roughly person shaped about twenty feet away from me.
"You should pay better attention to your surroundings."
The voice of a young girl filtered through the fog, disguised slightly by a poor attempt to growl the words at a lower octave. They still surprised me, causing me to jump, spinning around to face where the voice came from. The phone slipped from my hands to clatter against the floor as I unhooked my crossbow from my belt in a motion far smoother than I had ever done in practice. The contraption unfolded in my hands, the draw winching back automatically as it did so. I dropped a dart into the feed from one of the small cases I had strapped to my right forearm and pointed it at the figure.
As the wind shifted, the fog cleared slightly and I could see a girl, maybe five or six inches taller than me, wearing a heavy black cloak over a rough body suit that clung to her skin. Strapped over this she had black metal guards on her knees and arms, as well as some kind of reinforced metal gloves on her hands. There was a heavy looking tool belt around her waist that had been repurposed to carry a pair of crossbows that looked similar to my own, though far lower in quality. She was wearing a modified hockey mask over her face, the pale white mask looked clipped to the inside of her hood like mine and gave a ghostly quality to her appearance as she flickered between solid and semi-solid while standing in the mists.
"You've got decent reflexes though; I'll give you that."
I heard her voice drift through the night air towards me. The words were encouraging, but there was an overall tone of condescension as she watched me. I suddenly felt a little on display as she ran her eyes over my costume, and I could almost sense the sneer that was forming underneath her mask. Aside from some crossover in in the shape of our outfits and the crossbows we used, I don't know that we could have appeared any more different and I could tell she did not care for the brightness of my costume.
I lowered the bow, ejecting the dart back into its case and letting it fold back up again, before replacing it on my belt. Raising my hand to show I was now unarmed I waved at the vigilante in front of me and said, "Hi, you're Shadow Stalker, right?" My voice quavered a little with nerves. I wasn't sure why, but this felt far more difficult than shooting at gang members.
The dark clad figure snorted. "Yeah that's me. What are you calling yourself? Princess? Sparkles? Rhinestone maybe?" There was acid in her voice as she spoke. I didn't think I had done anything to really annoy her, I had pointed my crossbow at her, but she was a vigilante, so she must be used to that. I decided to ignore the jibes and try and be open with her in the hope that I could defuse things.
"I haven't decided on a name yet, though I think the PRT are calling me Sprite." I replied, as calmly as possible. She responded with a casual wave of her hand as she leaned up against the crumbling wall at the lip of the building.
"Don't let the PRT decide your name, it's weak, lets them think they own you. Pick your own, and make sure you do it before the idiots online get a chance to do it," she snarled at me from where she stood, now leaning up against the broken wall at the edge of the roof. From her tone of voice I was half convinced that she was going to draw one of her weapons and shoot me at a moment's notice.
"Ok…" I drew the word out, trying to bridge the gaps in this conversation as I struggled for words. "I asked to meet you tonight because…"
"Yeah, I don't really care," she interrupted me, shifting so that she was crouched down on the wall now, instead of leaning against it. Her pale mask stark against her barely visible body as she stared across the roof at me. "I only really came because I was curious, and I was going hunting round here anyway."
"You aren't interested in getting back up?" I asked, confused.
"Why bother? You will be dead in a couple of weeks, anyway. New capes don't last long in Brockton." Was the chilling reply.
"I was thinking we could have each other's backs; I could make you gear, and you could watch out for me while I get up to speed." I said neutrally, trying not to lash out at the blunt declaration of my imminent demise.
"No point really, once you bite it I would be left holding onto a bunch of broken gear and you wouldn't be around to fix it. Better to not get used to having anything that unreliable. I don't want to get killed because your shitty tinker-tech broke at the wrong moment." The words were spoken casually, but there was a weight of judgement behind them, like she had seen enough of me to decide that there was no hope for me, and it wasn't worth it to get invested. For a moment I was tempted to tell her that my stuff doesn't break, but what would be the point. It's not like she would believe me, clearly she had decided I was unworthy before I even opened my mouth.
"What the hell gives you the right to judge me like that?" I bit back angrily. I could feel the heat of my breath against the silk in front of my face, my heart was beating fast in my chest as my blood pounded in my ears.
"Listen Sparkles, I've been doing this for two years," she said heatedly. She didn't seem to like my aggression, but I didn't really care at this point. "And every wannabe hero that hits the streets eventually winds up face down in the gutter. You haven't given me any reason to think you would be any different." She gestured in my general direction "If you make it past six months then I might change my mind. But odds are, you just aren't worth my time."
"Because you are so much better than me, going two years and still spending all of your time sniping at drug addicts and drunks who can't fight back. At least some of us are trying to make a difference." I had done my research on Shadow Stalker. Apparently she was incredibly violent but stuck to taking out Merchants and low level members of the ABB and Empire.
She bristled at my words as they clearly struck a nerve. One hand drifted down, reaching for the handle of her crossbow for a moment. She stopped herself as she saw me shifting my stance to make it easier to grab my own weapons, and instead she clenched her hand into a fist and turned away to look out over the night sky.
"If I have to explain to you why it's better to be alive and taking out the trash, instead of getting myself killed picking a fight I can't win, then I severely overestimated how long you are going to be sticking around." Before I could say anything to that, she stood up. Her cloak billowed a little as she stood on the wall, straightening her back so that she cut through the fog like a knife. "Anyway, I've got places to be. Later, Sparkles."
With that she kicked away from the roof, and as she twisted in the air and started to fall her body shifted. It went completely immaterial, an opaque shadow indistinguishable from the dark sky around it. I could barely see the outline of her mask under her hood, looking almost skull-like as she dropped slowly away, drifting towards the nearby rooftop as she was carried by the wind.
As she disappeared out of sight, I was left once more to myself, seething on the top of an abandoned building.
Thanks go to the wonderful ccstat for beta reading this chapter, you deserve a cookie.
As I said last update, I'm going to take a short hiatus as I have two massive job interviews next week that I really have not done enough preparation for yet. The next chapter is already written (it was originally part of this one but it would have come in at around 11000 words and there was a natural break, so I split them up) but I won't start editing it until after my interviews. It should be ready fairly soon after that though.
Hope you enjoyed this chapter, let me know what you think and have a wonderful pride month ( this chapter was actually written and named well before I realised it was pride month, sometimes things just work out I guess)