Diatonic 1.3
Monday, April 11, 2011
Unfortunately, it seemed that simply wanting to find stuff does not translate to actually finding anything. Which was weird, considering I was in the Docks and stuff was usually pretty sketchy.
It was sobering to realize that I'd gotten pretty damn lucky last night, finding Lung and then being able to fight him.
Which… probably contributed to the total lack of activity that I was seeing. The ABB was probably pretty rattled, and without the backing of Lung, were trying to keep a low profile.
As I left the Graveyard, I'd taken a moment to alter my body –and my armor to match, slightly improving it at the same time– after realizing I'd neglected to do so in the alley after school. And… okay. Yeah. I'll admit it. I made myself really, really attractive. Way prettier than Emma, even. Gorgeous. …Not that anyone would get to see it under the armor. But you know what? Fuck it. My body was a mass of nanomachines and I'd do what I fucking wanted with them, thank you very much. I had the ability to look as beautiful as I wanted, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with taking advantage of that, dammit.
Try and tell me you wouldn't do the same thing in my position. Because we both know that's a lie.
Anyways. Roof-traveling was pretty fun, being able to jump from three-story buildings to five-story apartments with no effort. I'd played a little bit with my durability and strength before. Mostly just testing, because I couldn't do anything surreptitiously in the city before my costume was done, but I'd been able to lift a few tons in the Boat Graveyard without anybody seeming to notice.
My testing on that had been limited more by how unwieldy it had gotten than weight of the things I lifted. And of course, I now knew that I could exert pressures in excess of 250 tons –which I'd ballpark calculated today from some numbers I'd looked up after having punched a goddamn fucking hole through Lung's chest– from how I'd ripped out bulkheads and sheared and bent the steel to make my original armor.
So, uh, yeah. I was pretty damn strong.
I found myself idly wondering if there was anybody stronger than me in Brockton right now. If anybody, it'd probably be Glory Girl. How much could she lift?
[Accessing...]
–Fucking hell!
I still wasn't used to that. Right. Access to the entire internet in my head without any effort at all, triggered just by wanting to know something. At least right now, my mask covered my entire face, so my eyes didn't look like tinkertech. …Though the lens-covered eye-holes in my mask were probably glowing white or something.
Anyways. Glory Girl could lift at least 1 ton and said that she could lift a tanker truck –30-ish tons– if she really wanted to, according to both PHO and the wiki.
Cool. So I might just be the strongest person in the bay.
I felt myself grinning. Yeah, okay, that was pretty damn awesome. It meant I had to be seriously careful about my strength, though. And I was, usually.
I'd just panicked and gone full-out last night with Lung. Totally understandable. Totally.
(No but really, Lung was scary as fuck.)
That made me think, though. My body was solid nanomaterial. A block of silver nanomachines that only emulated human skin and other organs on the surface (heat, color, squishiness, etc.). What would happen if I specialized certain nanomaterial to a particular function, or actually constructed real parts in my body? Nanomaterial was sort of a "jack of all trades, master of some but not all" thing. It could be anything, build anything, and did a decent job at it, too, but it wasn't the same as something that was dedicated to the task.
But what if I had a dedicated muscular system that was literally made only for being that? Or I layered myself in some sort of material that had stronger molecular bonds than my nanomaterial could form between each nanomachine for durability?
Could I be stronger? Faster? Less… vulnerable? I mean, sure, my Wave-Force Armor was freaking impressive, but it had a limit, one that I felt I could increase with work, but there would always be a limit. And my body… it could hold up against… what was it called? Small-arms fire? Yeah. But I doubted that it would hold up against anything much better than that.
And considering the fact that it was only a matter of when, not if I encountered tinkertech weapons, I needed to be prepared. Lasers I should be able to handle with my Armor. Radiation, too, though I think I was naturally immune to that. Gravity… up to a certain point, like lasers. Anything else I'd have to figure out as I went, and I didn't like that. I liked being prepared. It was what had saved my skin against Sophia, Madison, and Emma more than once.
Being prepared meant you could react immediately instead of needing to regroup in order to retaliate. It meant the difference between being at a disadvantage and being able to press forward.
It was one of the things Armsmaster was famous for, and why he could adapt to any situation and come out ahead.
So the more I learned about what I could do, the more I learned about how to use everything at my disposal to become the best I could be, the safer and more effective I could be achieving my objectives, whatever they were.
There would be trade-offs, as with any changes, but if I could mitigate them as much as possible, they would become less of a problem holding me back. The biggest downside I could think about to making a more static body was losing my ability to disguise myself as well. Oh, I could probably still imitate any humans, but I wouldn't be able to become anything like I could now.
…It would protect my Core better, though.
Yeah. That decided it. Anything that could protect my Core better was high priority. It was part of why I had originally made my armor so ridiculously overkill. Granted, I hadn't known for sure if I actually had a Core, just the words of that silver-haired girl, but better safe than sorry. …Especially when you were told that it contained you now. Apparently less squishy than a human brain, but still a vulnerable point.
Now, though, I knew she'd been telling the truth. And… that kind of made everything more real. I'd believed her, for some value of "believed", because why would she want to lie to me? But despite both my rationality and the whispers even further at the back of mind that said it wasn't, I'd still kind of held onto the ridiculous and ever-decreasing chance –however extremely small it was– that it had just been a hallucination, that I was a normal parahuman, and I wasn't just a computer program.
Nope. It was well and truly confirmed.
Taylor Hebert, magical robot girl. Aka Relentless of the Fog, Experimental Platform X-1.
…Wait. What the fu–
"Hey!"
I jumped. Not across another gap between buildings, but ten feet straight up into the air. Literally.
Good god, if I'd still had a heart it would've been going at jackrabbit speeds.
I turned around. A short girl, twelve or thirteen if I had to guess, stood at the opposite edge of the building, dressed in a skirt with white and green lines traveling over it in waves and a green top that had some kind of armor plating integrated in it. A green visor covered her eyes.
To her left, on what appeared to be an oversized skateboard with a red glow under it –antigravity of some sort–, stood a boy with a red visor-slash-helmet and full body armor.
Vista and Kid Win. Local Wards. Vista had been on the team since… 2008. Kid Win since the end of 2009, according to his wiki page.
How the hell had I managed to not notice them? I had nigh-perfect hearing and sight.
Except… my attention was limited. Damn. Note to self: No zoning out in the middle of running around.
"Sorry. We didn't mean to startle you," Kid Win said. "Just wanted to talk to you. You're Relentless, right? The one who got Lung last night?"
I nodded.
He smiled slightly and crossed the gap, Vista at his side, and held out his hand. "Really nice job on that. I'm Kid Win."
I shook it, and Vista did the same. "Vista," she provided shortly.
Huh. She was… different than what I expected.
"Relentless. But… you already knew that," I said, trying to project a sense of confidence when I really didn't have any at all.
He nodded. "Right." And then he turned his head towards Vista, looking at her, and then back to me. "We weren't really expecting to see you out. We were on a standard patrol route and didn't recognize you at first. Armsmaster told us what your armor looked like, but from far away it's more difficult to tell who's who so we came over to check.
"With that said, we were maybe wondering if you'd be interested in patrolling with us?" he asked.
My first impulse was to reject them right out. But I squashed that and actually thought about it. They could be trying to make up for Armsmaster's shitty first impression last night. Or they were honestly just interested in the new cape. It was tempting. They both had over two years of experience with this sort of thing, whereas I… had a grand total of one night.
I weighed the consequences.
Pros: Experience. The more I could learn, faster, the better. I'd gotten lucky with Lung the night before, and I knew it. So anything that would improve my abilities was important, and there wasn't any better way to do that than interacting with people who knew what they were doing. An eidetic memory seriously helped with that.
Cons: …I'd have to interact with people from the very group I didn't want to be part of.
But, this could be a nice balance of what I wanted: not too much interaction, drama, or the risk of someone finding out what I was, but still learning and making good with the local heroes.
So I nodded. "…Alright."
He smiled slightly. "Great. We're going to be going through the Docks, looping around the north end of downtown, and then heading back to the PRT building."
Vista walked forward, past me, and I turned around to see what she was doing. The space between the building we were on and the next just …disappeared, like someone had just pinched them together.
Holy shit.
Now I got why she was considered such a high-power Shaker.
Kid Win drifted forward after her on his hoverboard, and I followed, significantly slower than I'd been going before. I kind of wanted a chance to look at his board, see how it worked and if it was anything like my graviton drives or how I could manipulate strings. I doubted he'd let me though, and that might get me labeled as a Tinker, which I didn't want. Just Brute and Shaker, please.
"You're a Brute, right?" Vista asked, speaking up for the first time and echoing my thoughts. "That's what Armsmaster said."
I frowned slightly behind my mask. Were they fishing for information?
"It's better to know now in case we run into anything than if in the middle of a fight," she added. "So that we can prioritize and organize things better."
Should I just tell them? That was a pretty good reason, and my strength wasn't a secret after Lung. The only thing they wouldn't know about was my forcefield, and that was a pretty big tactical advantage in a fight. It would seriously affect how Vista and Kid Win could act or whether they would consider me a vulnerability.
Eh, it'd come out eventually anyways. Better to just be upfront about it and have some control over the information they got.
"Um, actually Brute-slash-Shaker," I said.
Kid Win looked over at me as Vista compressed another gap between rooftops, this time including the two-story difference. Jesus.
"Shaker?"
"Yeah. I've… got a force-field I can put around me," I told them. "Here."
I manifested my Armor at the edge of its range, about twenty feet away, surrounding us in a dome of white hexagons. After a couple of seconds I dismissed the panels and formed another one above my outstretched hand.
Vista suddenly reached over and prodded it, running her hand over the smooth surface and then pushing against it.
"So you're a tank, then," she stated.
Absently pulling the definition of the term from the internet, I thought about it. I could take and deal out a lot of damage, but I also had good maneuverability. "Yeah, pretty much. I can still move around, though."
Kid Win quirked a smile again. "We saw. You were going fairly fast there for a while, and then you slowed down and we were able to catch up."
Ah. Right.
"It must be pretty nice, though. Not many Brutes are able to do things like that. Usually it's something like extreme durability, or super-strength, but not enough that they can jump or move really fast," Kid Win commented.
It was nice, to be fair. It was… freeing. Knowing that it was highly unlikely anything would ever be able to seriously hurt me, and if it did I could probably get away. I couldn't feel pain anyways. Pain was a symptom of your body telling you something was wrong, potentially dangerous. Pain, for humans at least, was important.
Me? I didn't have anything like that. I was nanomaterial, plain and simple. If something cut me, I could just fix it. Or not, for that matter, since surface wounds wouldn't likely impact me in any way.
Though… if I did build myself more specialized parts, it might be good to have something similar to pain, if more… advanced and specific, just so I'd know instinctively when something was wrong and what it was.
I heard the sounds of a commotion and turned my head to the left to focus on it. "Something's happening."
Kid Win gave me an appraising look before turning to face the same direction. "Console, we have a possible altercation in progress south our location, permission to investigate?"
…Yeah, I definitely wouldn't like having to do that constantly. It felt wrong to think about being under someone else's leadership.
He must have gotten a positive response, because he nodded at me, and Vista bridged the gap over the street. We moved faster –Vista running to keep up with Kid Win and I– closing in on the sounds I could hear.
We stopped at the edge of the closest building, looking down on the street. There were people moving between a building and a panel van, carrying stuff out. Some of them had black objects sticking out of their waistbands which I identified as pistols. And then one guy was directing them, a black guy with a sub-machine gun who was yelling at the others to "move it".
Vista looked over the scene, and then huffed, appearing frustrated.
"Console, we have what looks to be a Merchant drug transfer and a possible lab. At least seven civilians, likely more. Small arms, though one of them has a sub-machine gun. Orders?" Kid Win spoke once more. "No, no parahumans," and then "…Understood."
He turned to me. "We're moving on."
"What." My voice was flat with disbelief. They wanted to just leave this? What the fuck?
Kid Win sighed. "Look, we aren't prepared to deal with that many people, and especially not that many armed with weapons. Vista and I may know what we're doing, but one stray bullet and we're dead. Part of being good at this is knowing where your limits are. Console will inform the police, and the police will handle it, okay? It's what they do. If there were capes here, it might be a different story. But we'd still wait for backup and the PRT before engaging. But as it is, with just civilians, well, it's just not worth the risk."
I… heard what he was saying. But making the connection between the words and the meaning was hard. They were saying they weren't going to fight something like this. And that didn't make any sense to me.
I got that the police would be able to fight them. But they wouldn't be able to nearly as efficiently or effectively as I could. Looking at the situation, I didn't want to just leave it. This is what I had been searching for, something where I could make a difference.
"I… I'm sorry, I can't accept that," I said, facing Kid Win. Vista's eyes held a measuring look in them as she listened to me. "You guys can go, but I'm going to deal with this." I took a few steps sideways, towards the building's edge, and turned back one last time. "…It was nice meeting you."
And then I stepped off the side of the building. I vaguely heard Kid Win calling out my name behind me, but didn't pay attention. They weren't important anymore in this situation, having elected to be non-combatants.
I landed, not on the sidewalk like I had last night, but on a panel of my Armor. With little effort, I tilted the panel forty degrees and pushed off of it, easily clearing the distance between the two sidewalks and landing in front of the men.
The men around me started reacting, the lead one predictably yelling "Cape!" He raised the gun in his hand and pointed it at me. "Shoot!"
His finger closed around the trigger, and even before the first spray of bullets emerged I had my Armor in place. Gunfire surrounded me, and I just stood there, my Armor around me, waiting until they all ran out.
Which they did.
The sub-machine guy's gun clicked empty first, and then around me the pistols started doing the same. I waited a second or two for the smoke to clear, letting them see the way their bullets hung in the air, stuck where they'd impacted my Armor.
I allowed the bullets to drop with little metal clinks, and grinned behind my mask. "My turn."
[Klein field status: 4% of current total capacity]
I released the acquired kinetic energy outwards in all directions as a concussive wave, and the men were thrown backwards, landing roughly on the pavement a few feet from where they'd been standing.
Most of them were dazed just from that action, but a few others weren't, and made to get up and run.
Nope. Not today.
I quickly moved to meet them and knocked them out, binding their hands and ankles with thin strips of nanomaterial that I made to look like plastic zip-ties which I'd simply pulled from a pocket underneath one of my armor plates, when in reality I'd created them right there.
I moved onto the downed guys and did the same for them.
Brushing off my hands, I looked at the building. There were probably a few–
"What the fuck's going o– SHIT!!"
Yep. Still some guys in there.
The man who'd been coming out of the door and seen me dropped what he had in his hands and rushed back inside, and I followed.
The building was an old apartment building, a simple three-story deal with a few broken windows and parts that showed signs of neglect. The inside was similar, the plaster walls cracked and aging, dirt on the floor, and some unidentifiable substance splattered on the ceiling.
I followed the sounds the man made as he ran upstairs, and pursued him, taking stairs two at a time.
"Jake! There's a fuckin' cape!" he yelled. He was on the second floor, a couple rooms down, and I could smell a number of chemicals in the air, probably by-products of whatever they were cooking in the place.
There was another sound, this time the tinkling of glass breaking, and I made my way to the door it had come from, trying to open it.
Locked.
…Not exactly a problem for me.
I pushed the door open, ripping the deadbolt and latch through the wooden jamb, the flimsy metal chain popping apart from the force I used.
"Fuck!"
Entering the room, I looked around. Lots of glass containers, a few burners. Probably a meth lab then. Or at least some sort of amphetamine.
There were four people in the room, two who looked like they'd been packaging stuff up, probably for the guys who had been taking it to the car, the guy I'd seen who'd run back up here, and finally one over by the counter on the right with all the lab equipment.
All of the first three had dust masks on. Well, I guess when it came to drugs the Merchants were at least semi-intelligent instead of just plain idiots.
Two of them had guns pointed at me. I picked the one on my left to deal with first. His eyes widened and the gun in his hands jumped as he fired a few times before I reached him, but my Armor had already taken care of the bullets. Instead of being dramatic, I just let them fall to the floor this time.
I grabbed the gun out of his hand when I reached him, and then squeezed.
The gun crumpled and folded, and the guy in front of me whimpered, raising his hands. The others around the room followed his lead, even the other guy with the gun, which he just dropped to the floor.
I treated them the same way that I had the ones outside, nanomaterial bindings on wrists and ankles. They wouldn't be a problem anymore.
I eyed the lab setup, and ultimately just went over and turned off the two burners that were on.
I'd call this a success.
Satisfied with my work, I made my way out of the building.
Vista and Kid Win were nowhere to be found.
…Well, shit.
They'd probably had to go on without me and continue their patrol. I'd imagine they had a schedule, and whoever was directing them had told them they weren't allowed to do anything.
Plus, I had to consider it from their side: I was a new independent, not part of their team, and had shown that it was highly unlikely I could get hurt by anything these guys could do. I wasn't their responsibility, and it wasn't their job to get me out of anything I got myself into.
That didn't mean I wasn't slightly annoyed by it.
I waited the two minutes until I heard police sirens getting closer, and then jumped up onto a roof and left.
Honestly, the fight had been underwhelming. It didn't even come close to pushing me the way Lung had. It was just some druggie Merchants with guns, not even really a threat to me.
I… I wanted something more. Something that was meaningful. I was Relentless of the Fog, and I wasn't meant for such small things.
I idly checked the nanomaterial in the Graveyard that had been at the back of my mind and was pleased that in the time since I'd left it had almost managed to double itself, eating through the metal surfaces it had spread out on as it replaced the material that was there. Another hour and it should have accomplished that. Another five hours, and it would have doubled again. And again. And again. And again. Rinse. Repeat.
Exponential growth. Ain't it just magical?
Instead of getting lost in my thoughts and getting surprised again, I paid attention to my surroundings, not wanting something like what had happened with Vista and Kid Win to happen again with less friendly parahumans.
I made it home by seven –having absorbed my armor in another alley–, beating dad since his car wasn't even in the driveway. Frowning slightly as I made my way inside, I went to the kitchen and got the leftover lasagna we'd frozen a week ago out and started to preheat the oven.
My view on food was… different now, and not just my sense of taste. I didn't need to eat, and that had definitely changed how I viewed it in general. However, this morning's meal had confirmed my suspicions: my body simply made more nanomaterial out of whatever I consumed, replacing others that had denatured or malfunctioned in some way and were effectively irrecoverable. Constructing new nanomachines was easier than repairing old ones, and the broken ones were simply broken down and re-used or discarded.
Let's be real, the human body does the exact same thing. You shed about forty thousand skin cells every hour. That's almost a thousand times more than the amount I lose in the same period of time.
Everything that wasn't used in production got discarded too. So… uh, yeah. I ate stuff, literally atomized it, and whatever I didn't need was released and just floated away.
Cool, huh?
Most of it was carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen anyways. I used a good chunk of the carbon –about two thirds of it–, but I was more after the weirder stuff. Iron and nickel were pretty common. Manganese, chromium, molybdenum, selenium, and tungsten were rarer. Mercury would have been super handy, since I needed to synthesize that when it was needed –as I did a bunch of other things, too–, but people tend to freak out when there's mercury in food. Which is understandable, since it's really poisonous to humans. I could have used it, though.
But Taylor, you're saying, how are you made of all these heavy elements yet still weighing what a human does?
Because each nanomachine actually counters its own weight by lessening the effect gravitons have on it, despite still having the same mass. This lessening is controllable to some degree, and basically means that no matter what mass I am, I only weigh as much –or little– as I want, within certain limits. I couldn't use it to fly or be weightless, for one. Nanomaterial itself can't completely counter gravity. So with the number of nanomachines in my body as it was, I'd always weigh something, even if it was comparatively little.
The oven beeped to let me know it was done preheating, so I opened it and put the lasagna in, setting the timer for an hour and fifteen minutes.
And then… I confronted the bane of every student. Homework. A perfect memory does not make it any less tedious, let me tell you. I finished a few worksheets, did my Trig in five minutes, all of which was spent writing out the steps since I solved the problems as soon as I saw them, and then finally finished with working on an English essay. Another fun factoid about being a computer: English essays and literary analyses do not get easier just because you can crunch numbers really fast.
Trust me, I know.
I heard Dad's car coming down the street all the way from the stoplight, and started setting the table for dinner after clearing my work off of it.
The lasagna wasn't quite done yet, but it was close, so I took the foil off the top to let it finish. Leftover green beans were in the fridge, so I got them out and put them in the microwave, setting them to cook.
The car pulled into the driveway and shut off, the door opening and then closing with a muted 'thud'. The loose board in the front steps groaned, and then the door opened seconds later.
Shoes came off in the mudroom. Car keys got tossed into the small bowl on the side-table in the hall.
"Hey Taylor. That smells pretty good," my dad said, coming around the corner into the kitchen. "Thanks for doing dinner."
I smiled at him. "Of course, Dad."
Ever since the locker, my relationship with my father had improved. I don't know if it was because I was making more of an effort or he was, or even both of us, but the results were the same.
Seeing each other every morning at breakfast time now that I was never tired and could wake up whenever had contributed in large part to it, I suspected.
He wandered over to the fridge and got a beer out while I opened the oven again and checked the lasagna. It looked done… And by looked, I mean both normal human visually and infrared-heat visually.
Heh. Using infrared vision to help cook lasagna. Just a day in the life of Taylor Hebert, people.
I put the oven mitts that were on the counter on and pulled the Pyrex dish out of the oven, placing it on the stove, and then used a metal spatula from a drawer to start cutting sections.
Dad picked both plates up from the table and placed a square of lasagna on each one while I got the green bean out of the microwave and brought them over, letting Dad serve himself as I waited and then did the same.
The plates went on the table, my dad sitting down and starting to eat as I got myself a glass of water and joined him.
"So how was school?"
I grimaced internally, not wanting to get into the clusterfuck that was my situation with Emma right now.
"It was okay. Math and chem are boring, I think I've worked too far ahead." And have an innate understanding of everything from n-dimensional manifolds to analytic combinatorics and complex variable function theory.
"Gladly's class was… the usual," I finished.
Dad made a sound of understanding.
"I was researching some interesting stuff, though. Not for a project or anything, just on my own."
"Oh?"
"Mmhm. Old World War Two ships and newer planes and stuff," I told him.
"Well, I don't know about newer planes, but Brockton actually had one of the shipyards they used in the War, you know?"
I looked at him in interest. I hadn't seen anything about that, but then again I'd been using the slow, cumbersome school computer.
"Really?"
He nodded. "Yeah. Destroyers and subs came out of here. It's why the Bay had such a nice channel, even before tankers and cargo ships started using it.
"If my father were still around, he'd be able to talk your ear off for hours about this stuff. It's what he was interested in. Knew just about everything about every ship that came out of here," Dad said, smiling. "He loved it. Even had some models."
I grinned. "Wow."
It was rare I heard anything about my dad's parents. They'd died before I was born, so I didn't even get to know them.
"Actually, we might even have them somewhere in the attic, packed away if you're really that interested. Can't think of anything else that would've happened to them. If you want, we can go look after dinner."
"Really?"
"Sure. If anything, he'd be glad that someone was getting something out of them. They're not doing anybody any good just collecting dust up there," he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin.
I nodded, slightly excited by it actually. World War Two submarines were pretty small, not even nearing the giant size of modern nuclear subs.
Dad and I finished dinner, clearing the table and putting the dirty dishes in the dishwasher while the lasagna we hadn't eaten went in the fridge for the next day or the day after.
Once the kitchen was clean, my dad looked over at me. "Well, come on. Let's go searching."
He headed upstairs, and I followed as he pulled down the stairs to the attic and tramped up them. At the top he pulled on the metal pull-cord that turned on the single bare bulb in the room, and looked around.
"I think it's over in the corner," he muttered to himself, before walking in that direction and dragging a box out. Dad opened the flaps, peeking inside and then folding it back up. "Yeah, here we go."
He picked it up and I moved to the side to let him go around me. I clicked the light off as we went back down the stairs, and followed him down the hall to my room, pushing the door open and then setting the box on the floor a few feet from my bed.
Dad knelt down and opened the box again as I went to my bed and sat down, and began pulling things out of it. A couple folders went to the side, and then he reached in with both hands and pulled out something long and cylindrical in cloth that he unwrapped and then held out to me.
A model sub. I took it, looking it over.
Dark plastic, with little holes running along the sides at the front, and lines strung between posts on the deck. A white '257' was painted above the foremost holes, and on the conning tower.
USS Harder, SS-257.
I had information about this sub. I don't know how, but I did. Statistics, point of origin, commissioning date…
Dad held out another object to me and I placed the submarine to the side on my bed, taking the next model from his hand.
A destroyer.
A destroyer with '468' painted on it.
USS Taylor, DD-468.
The data I had conflicted. It said she was built in Bath, but if Grandpa had a model of her, it had to mean she was built here, in Brockton.
"Taylor?" My dad was looking at me. "What're you thinking?"
I shook my head. "Sorry. Sorry. Nothing." I laughed. "It's just… funny. This is a model of the USS Taylor. Spelled like my name. Two thousand tons, sixty thousand horsepower with a range of sixty-five hundred nautical miles and three-hundred thirty six crew members."
Dad looked surprised, and then he laughed. "You sound just like him, now, you know." He shook his head. "I bet he would've loved to talk to you about this stuff."
He put his hands on his knees and then pushed himself upright, standing. "Well, there's a few more in there, and some other things too. I'll leave you to it. If you'd like we could probably make a couple shelves and set them up in here."
I grinned. "I'd really like that."
Putting the Taylor to my side next to the Harder, I stood up and walked forward, wrapping my arms around my dad in a hug. "Thanks, dad."
I could hear the smile in his voice as he responded, patting my head. "'Course, Taylor."
I don't know how Dad had missed it, but there wasn't just another destroyer or two, there was a destroyer, another Gato-class sub, the light cruiser Nashville, and to my extreme surprise, a model of the USS Wisconsin.
Brockton must not have just been a shipyard, but one of the major ones. A quick check of the internet confirmed my suspicions. The company running it had lost contracts in the seventies from steadily worsening late deliveries, however, and ended up folding soon after.
There were pages of documents and photos, even some blueprints. Handwritten notes in margins that I assume was from my grandfather and his experiences seeing and even being on a few of the ships.
I pored through it all, consuming it.
It didn't last long.
I wrapped all of the models up and put them back, for when Dad and I would get to put some shelves in my room, probably this weekend.
And then… I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
It may have looked like I was doing nothing, but I was running through physics simulations, tests, doing research online and modeling different configurations of my first project.
The biggest issue was power. For all the knowledge I had, it felt like I was missing something, something that would be able to provide enough energy directly to the propulsion systems. Instead... I was going to have to do some hacks.
To generate the power that would be required for the thrusters (and also providing electricity), I was going to have to use antimatter. Specifically, an antimatter/matter reactor.
Not nearly as efficient as I would have liked, but it would work.
Meanwhile, the nanomaterial over in the Graveyard was proceeding along nicely, having replaced the entire surface of whatever floor/wall/whatever they were on by one o'clock. The nanomaterial that had been used on my Merchant victims as zip-ties, however, had been cut off and tossed in a trashbag, and it seemed like they were currently being put in a dumpster.
Hm.
I waited a minute or two, and then gathered the nanomaterial into a vaguely spider-shaped thing. Eating through the plastic bag was easy. Climbing out of the dumpster was a bit trickier, but I solved it by squeezing my nanomaterial through the gap at the edge of the flap and then re-forming the spider-thing outside.
It took a good hour and a half of rather impressive jumping and running on my part to bring the nanomaterial back to me, but I used the idle time to continue my simulated experiments.
Eventually though, it reached my windowsill, where I squeezed it through the crack and had it jump and land on my chest.
…Wherein it promptly melted into my body.
Satisfied that all was now right, I set my internal wake-up time and made sure that my nanomaterial would continue replicating while I was out before finally falling into the blank dark nothingness I called sleep.
A/N:
Lots of setup and building towards the coming week.
Chris is very much a people-person, shown in his scene of recruiting Chariot. He picks up social cues, notices details, draws connections, and can steer conversations around. However, he also has a tendency to self-denigrate himself and focus on his flaws and failures. In a fight, he's a very good shot with his blaster.
There isn't a very good characterization of Vista prior to Leviathan and Gallant and Aegis' deaths. All we see is that she's a competent fighter, and trusts her teammates to have her back. She has a bunch of scars and is proud of them, having sewn up a particularly large one on her chest by herself when she was only eleven. She's got a bit of an inferiority complex, tending to over-compensate or get annoyed when people bring up her size, age, or lack of physical maturity, and especially if they think she's unskilled or incompetent. In general, though, Missy is a fucking badass.
