Greg jerked awake, lifting himself bodily from the floor he found himself on. He flinched at the smear of watery residue coating his face and front, the tears even now still falling freely. Wiping them away as they tapered off into nothingness, he sat back in a cross legged position.
Why had he been crying? He remembered crying in his dream, but he couldn't for the life of him remember why he had been crying. The entire dream was hazy, echoing vestiges that scattered away from his consciousness like wisps of cloudy nothingness.
Greg looked around, noting that he was back home. Safely ensconced within the walls of the basement, his scattered tools and half finished projected littering the shelves and counters.
They had gotten back, he remembered that much. A harrowing escape from a telekinetic debris flinging racist asshole, a short trip back through the portal network…
"Oh," he eloquently stated, his head jerking up to stare at the empty stairs leading back to the rest of the house proper.
"Huh, guess I'll have to hide another pad in that area," Greg mused as he sedately meandered off the warp pad and over to a map he had defiled with notes of where he had planted additional warp pads.
"What the hell was that?!" Sparky shouted, cradling his head as he rocked back and forth on his heels.
"Sparks?" Greg probed, reaching a hand forth to rest on his friends shoulder, "It's okay, we're back home now, he can't get through the network-"
"No seriously," Sparky cut him off, slapping his hand away as he turned on Greg frantically. "What the fuck was that?!!? We almost died man, and here you are just… calm as you fucking please! What the hell, man? We almost died."
"It's not that big of a deal," Greg calmly stated, trying to placate his frazzled friend.
"He threw a fucking car at me!" Sparky screamed, throwing his hands up in anger. "Are you insane, or is this entire thing just sailing over your head? Cause I for one know that the normal fucking response to someone trying to kill you is not just bland… acceptance!" he spat out, turning and walking towards the stairs.
"Sparky," Greg called out, making to follow his friend.
"No!" Sparky spouted, whirling on him with fury in his eyes. "Just… just no. I… I need to clear my head man, and I… I can't do that with… with this," he snarled with a pointed flourish indicating his body, a flash of light masking his form as he transformed back to his normal self. "Just stay the fuck away from me man, till I get my head 'round this shit," he continued, making his way up the stairs.
Greg tried to call him back, but was rooted to the spot. Voiceless and breathless, unable to move, unable to think properly. An empty hole in his chest begging him to cajole her into staying. If only for a minute, a second, a moment…
The door to the top of the stairs slammed shut, heralding Gregs silent descent to the floor. Tears flowed freely as a deep sense of loss permeated her entire being. Echoes of her back lingered in her eyes as she walked away, once more too foolish to put down her pride and possessiveness.
As she swiftly lost consciousness, she could only release the barest of whispers.
"... please…"
Greg started, the phantom emotion threatening to overwhelm him once more.
"Fuck," he muttered, turning his back to the stairs. "Fine, leave... I don't need you," he continued, plunging his arms down to the elbows in his most recent batch of bioplasm. "Good consistency, smells like it's staying fresh, should be able to use the rest for the next parts too," he noted, before bringing up the two hard form casts he had left within to cure.
They were large and blocky, designed to fit directly over his lower legs. They didn't have the additionally power sinks and tech required for the form enhancements that he had been hoping for, but regardless they should still serve to enhance his base abilities. He might not be running any award winning marathons any time soon, but if he got the fluid conduit dispersal rate right then he'd have access to feats of strength… slightly above that of what his physical stature would otherwise indicate.
He wouldn't be going toe to toe with someone like Lung, or even a low rank bruiser such as Miss Militia. There was no real winning against someone whose powers consisted of 'can I haz all guns plox?'.
Against someone like say… Uber? A normal-'ish' guy whose only abilities apparently was just 'being good at stuff'? Lame.
Diverting power from their main systems should allow him to perform superhuman jumps, coupled with the grav dampers he had originally installed in the throne. Gem Tech was weird, some times he could almost swear he was packing more junk into a space than was possible to hold it.
Well, he always had sucked at Tetris. Not his fault that puzzle jazz didn't sit right with him.
The rest of the day passed in a blur, which he sporadically spent online while waiting for certain integral pieces to cure and trying to get Sparky to respond to one of his many messages.
Sparky had all but blocked him, leaving every last one of his PMs unread and waiting. It was infuriating, his friend didn't even pick up the few times he had called his cell phone.
PHO had blown up, it turned out that his and Sparkys adventure on the town was one of the less interesting events to occur that day. Which was kind of irritating, when a girl dresses up and hits the town they wanna be noticed darn it!
Ahem. Gender phrasing notwithstanding, it was still disappointing. Sure there was more than a dozen different threads dedicated to the 'bubblegum capes' who had gone out to a movie, more than a few of those bordering on creepy lesbian speculation between him and his friend. Wasn't Tinmother supposed to put a stop to that sort of stuff?
Hypocritical mods. When it's Greg asking if anyone got upskirts of Glory Girl, well that's a temporary ban! But flashing pictures of his ass as Peridot and that's just fiiiiine and dandy.
The pictures looked amazing, but it was still weird to attribute the alien physique as his own.
Delving into the more popular threads of the day, it turned out that as soon as he and Sparky had left a new cape had turned up. He thought he had seen a woman show up riding a lion while he was being whisked away by the warp pad, but had been unsure as to if the view had been real or a warp energy enforced hallucination.
Don't usually get lions in Brockton Bay, despite all the other crazy crap that goes down.
The woman -Girl? Older teenager? Her age was speculated on endlessly throughout PHO but he had been unable to find anything concrete. She looked nineteen, maybe?- had turned up alongside two others, also riding bareback on the pink furred lion.
And wasn't PHO making a stink about that too. 'Oh, that poor kitty, that's inhumane' seemed to be the main discourse revolving around people who thought the new cape had dyed a lion pink. Others claimed it to be a changer power the lion had, or maybe the lion was just another cape entirely?
Greg didn't know what to think, he'd never seen the darned thing before in his life but staring at the various pictures…
He was absolutely sure he knew the chick. And the lion. Which considering he had never seen either, was quite odd.
Scary Sword Lady -patent pending~- had shown up like a knight in shining armor, sword flashing and cutting Krieg down to size. Slicing through the various random crap he had tossed her way, eventually she slammed him to the ground and waited until the cops showed up.
He was knocked out, sure, but Greg hoped the cops had some sort of sappy handcuffs with the bastards name on them. As Sparky said, the jerk threw a car at them.
At which point she got back on her lion, and peaced out. Some sort of portal teleporter power the lion showed, roaring a portal into existence and simply jumping through it.
The other two she had shown up with though… purple and orange skinned, respectively. A spark had shot through Gregs head at the sight of both of them, ideas careening and crashing into each other as yet even more possibilities surfaced.
Amethyst, Jaspar.
Uniform, yet malleable. Mass producible.
Greg wasn't sure how he knew, but he knew he could make them too. It wouldn't even be all that hard! Simply construct the cutting apparatus, set up in a place people wouldn't randomly stumble across him, and bam! Instant helpers!
Minions, little helpers that could assist him in his efforts. Mom would be pleased, she had been oh so worried as of late thinking about him getting into trouble all on his lonesome. He had been hoping that Sparky would be willing to get out and about with him more now that he had also gotten powers…
Another message shot to him and a call also went unanswered.
Oh well. What did he need him for? He could just make his own friends, so there!
It took another hour to create the parts needed for a low rate cutter, an oblong box the size of a suitcase. It only had enough stuffin for a couple cuttings, if he wanted something with a little more shelf life he'd have to pour a ton more resources into the project.
Something for another day.
Surely there was some sort of taboo about creating sapient life, but Scary Sword Lady had done it so why couldn't he? Couldn't just let some random cape stealing all his glory have all the best toys.
Which brought to mind the fact that this SSL also had access to gem tech. Probably the source of the other purple skinned girl that had snuck into his house. A worry, that. All the more reason to bring more firepower on board as soon as possible!
It was kinda scary to think that a bunch of other people could be stealing credit for the tech he was making. He put hard work into this stuff, thank you very much!
Another few hours went into creating the arm casts. It was the absolute last dredges of his bioplasm. He'd have to get more toothpaste post haste if he wanted to continue with his efforts.
He needed the Throne 2.0, gosh darn it! And StormTiger needed a zero point energy blast straight to his stupid face. Piss all over his hard work and drop a building on him? He would feel the wrath of the Thrones progeny. Blood feud upon the blood bigot!
Oh yeah, and also for trying to kill him. But mostly for breaking the Throne.
Suiting up felt amazing, a surge of energy pooling at his fingertips and racing across his chest.
"I kinda look like megaman," he mused, looking over the chunky knee high boots. Sliding on the arm mounted limb enhancers didn't help that image, them only being slightly slimmer than the leg units.
They didn't immediately fall off when he walked from one end of the room to the other, so that was a plus.
The five 'fingers' on each limb detached from the enhancers when he powered them on, hovering a few centimeters from the surface. He hadn't been able to fit this set with an internal logistics system like he had wanted to on such short notice, but the standard zero point energy diffusers worked like a charm.
"I have the poooowah!" Greg crowed, levitating a paint bucket up and down with a concentrated zero point energy beam. There was no tangible feedback like if he had lifted it via ferrokinesis, but he could almost feel the object dragging pressure on his limb as he moved it around.
They were supposed to be able to pick up and displace up to four tons. Maybe. He hadn't been able to test them up to that weight. How was he supposed to? It was all theoretically possible at this point.
And he most certainly was not going to test the concussive blasts in the basement. Or in the backyard. Digging holes in the back lawn had gotten his backside beaten raw, he didn't want to think what his mom would do if she found him blowing it up.
Cutter and helper orboids gathered, Greg set off.
Sending himself to a deserted section of the train yard via warp pad, Greg set up in a nearby abandoned building. He had the orboids take up surveillance positions so that he wouldn't get snuck up on, and set up the cutter.
There were so many different gems he could make, and with only two sets available he knew what he needed to grow. Two peridots would be for the best, in his opinion. That way he could have them build stuff when he was out and about, doing his own thing.
More hands being busy!
And if he was right, he could probably make them in practically any environ. Inputting the selection into the cutters limited processor and just plopping the device face down on the neglected concrete floor, all Greg had to do was wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
"Gaaaaaawd this is friggin boring," he whined, shooting another text to Sparky.
Nothing.
'Nyeaaaaaaaahhhh," he let out, tapping away at his phone.
There was only so much PHO one could trawl through before they got bored, after all. Winged One had been needling him all night, sending cryptic 'I feel you have good fortune' messages and the like. She was probably drunk, what with her sporadic texts.
"Yo," he mouthed to himself, typing away, "Is you are the drunk. Question mark, you be soundings like you the drunk."
True, he could very well type his texts like any normal damned person. But where was the fun in that?
'I predict you are going to turn around and be quite surprised by an unforeseen event,' she texted back almost immediately.
"What you mean," he typed in response, having looked all around himself in a panic before deciding she must have been jerking his chain.
To his surprise, she didn't respond after that point.
"Great, someone else that's ignoring me," he sulked after waiting for a response for about five minutes.
Another call to Sparky, another message to the PM.
Nothing.
Finally, at one in the morning the cutter was finished with its task.
"Now, rise my minions!" Greg cackled, posing in a way he was sure looked imposing and impressive. The orboids gathered up the swiftly decomposing cutter, hopefully he could reuse its base components for… something else. Left behind were two depressions in the earth, both human shaped holes that sunk down into the ground.
After several seconds passed, he realized that his 'minions' were failing to produce themselves.
Peering into the holes, he did not see the expected bodies of his two new peridots. He didn't see any peridots, period. In one hole was a gleaming, pale pearl glinting in the sparkling moonlight. In the other was what he first assumed was a ruby.
"Padparadscha," he said aloud, stunned that he actually knew what it was called. "A red sapphire."
Staring into the holes, he swept up the two gems in a hand each.
"... and NOT what I specifically programmed you to make!" He hissed, glaring balefully at the already cooling goo that once had been a perfectly serviceable cutter. Except for the fact that it had almost completely not worked at all!
"What does a padpar even do?" He asked no one in particular. It and the pearl were both undesired outcomes. There went his grand plan of having lab assistants.
They lay inert, even after he arrived back home. Secreting himself once more in the basement -LAB!- he slotted both gems into his makeshift gem tech operating system. It was basically a bulky laptop, which was neither portable nor suitably small. It weighed almost forty pounds, for crying out loud! Still, it ran faster than his personal tower up in his room, and could play Crysis too!
He connected the OS to the gems, settling them both in hastily constructed bases.
"Well there's yer problem," he mused, puzzling out the flowing lines of code. There wasn't anything in the gems, they were just a hollow structure. Not to say that they had space inside of them physically, they just didn't have anything going on in terms of software.
"How the hell am I supposed to get this shit in you?" he grumbled, racking his brain for a solution. In the end, he settled on writing up a simple search program. Setting it to look out on the Internet for applicable information, it would hopefully copy over the relevant data the gems needed to produce a full form avatar.
Maybe they could still be useful for carrying out simple instructions?
At this point Greg was desperate for any kind of result, for the amount of time and resources he had poured into what was progressively looking like a wasted effort.
Sighing deeply, he decided to call it a night and check what progress had been made in the morning. Better than just staying up and fretting over the fact that SPARKY HADN'T READ ANY OF HIS FRIGGIN MESSAGES…
Yawning, he stepped on to the first step.
A flash of light bloomed behind him, casting the stairwell and the room around him into deep shadows. Turning around, he saw one of the gems floating above the table, the glare softly building to a fever pitch. It coalesced into a vaguely human figure, a caricature that echoed the form of a young girl.
The light disappeared in a flash, a small girl in a flowing red dress floating gently down to the floor. She had a reddened gem showing in the center of her chest, the light of the basement glinting off it in brilliant arcs.
She peered up at Greg, her eye half hidden by her sweeping bangs.
"I predict you are going to turn around and be quite surprised by an unforeseen event!" The unknown girl chortled, clapping her hands gleefully.
Authors Notes:
What, you thought I was just going to drop a pitiful little 500 word entry and expect you to be happy with that? Have a 3k chapter. You lot deserve it.
