We had just really gotten used to being married when the Behemoth was spotted in the early stages of that fucked up walk to Melbourne. It was supposed to be our Happily Ever After, not like this. We had everything we wanted for a full and wonderful eighteen months, but now I had nothing. Nothing and no one.
I should start over. Clients won't pay up if the Thinker they hired isn't thinking in the present. Unless it's for future stuff I guess, but I digress.
I lit up a cigarette and rehearsed my spiel in my head, it wouldn't help for the guy I was meeting with now, but I had another appointment at three-thirty and I was being way too unprofessional to do my job right now anyway. Ahem. 'I'm Captain Obvious, the Thinker with the amazing power to know what things are and what they're for.' And despite what's hinted at by the term, my power doesn't make me any less of an idiot at times. Thankfully, I had the most amazing woman in the world to help me run our superhero for hire business. No, not Alexandria; my wife and best friend, Major Oversight.
She died at the same time that Behemoth did. I didn't even get a body to bury. It was all condensed into that towering partial corpse that Bakuda's weapon left in its wake.
I tried to carry on as I had before without her, gods know that I tried. But I can't bring a dark world into the light, I don't even have light of my own. I quit heroics and its trappings almost entirely. Almost.
"This is a steampowered hemispherical omnidirectional dynamo, Mister-" I trailed off, taking my client's costume into consideration, it was a practical assortment of padded clothing with various Tinkertech gizmos attached. Very much bearing all the hallmarks of a new cape in my experience.
"No names." The gruff tone of the aspiring villain indicated that he was trying to be all business today.
"Haven't thought of one yet?" He wasn't wearing any sort of emblem so it was a fair guess. Being a good guesser for the details around the edges of your Thinkering was like fifty percent of being a Thinker for hire.
"...No."
Classic new cape.
"Word of advice for you and any of your like-minded associates, free of charge of course: 'Stilted Bride', 'Steam Yankee', and 'Brass Baron' are all taken." Those ones had been a quirkier group than I usually got, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say that Stilted Bride was an actual Tinker with how she was giggling when I appraised her magnifying goggles. Silvers didn't usually have real powers. "Anyway, your new gadget takes steam into this holding tank and as the steam cools back into water, it generates kinetic force to move a mechanical limb in any direction. It's supposed to hold a magnet, but I don't see one here."
That was the thing about silver capes, I couldn't say how they'd gotten the 'silver' moniker, just that they were still the same sort of desperate and slightly crazy that capes usually were. But as far as I could tell, none of them had actually triggered from their desperation. They just needed the kind of cash haul that the villain lifestyle could bring in and somehow lucked into just enough wrecked Riskian tech to mash together into working powers that could be used by a layperson.
Silvers were a growing trend all across the Eastern Seaboard, and probably beyond that. These normal people were dredging up Earth Risk's broken Tinkertech, bullshit magic charms, and the like, slapping it all together with some small but real engineering science. And then after accomplishing what at first I thought was just a one-off miracle, these boring normal people would go on a short spree or work the mercenary scene or something, and then they just paid off their mortgages or whatever it was normal people did with obscene villainy money. And then, bills paid off, they just left the game like it didn't have that weird sort of magnetic pull on them like it does for us regular capes. Absurd. Both that it was happening at all and that it hadn't happened sooner.
It wasn't how the game was usually played, but fuck the rules, right? They could somehow make broken Tinkertech work again, they deserved all the riches they could haul away with it. The Protectorate, for their part, didn't seem to know how to deal with silver cape crimes.
It was almost as if the system was set up to enable villainy. Instead of investigating, normal police just dropped the case off at the desks of the PRT. The PRT would always softball the first few incidents with a new parahuman to avoid setting them off at a vulnerable moment. Apparently they just expect the villain to ramp up their crimes, and planned on catching them red-handed at something audacious. Except that didn't happen with Silver capes, they'd be out of the game and have scrapped their costumes by the time the PRT realized this was actually a case for the normal police. And the normal police would just drop the case on lack of evidence after weeks of nothing being collected.
I lit up another cigarette and addressed my three-thirty appointment. "This is a blue garnet crystal lens, it harmlessly refracts and redirects the beams of cryonic and necrotic lasers. And those are magnetite impact batteries, they store the force of slingshots as energy that can be used to magnetize large amounts of alloys containing iron or nickel."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"That's Tinkertech, baby."
"At least show me how the batteries work!" Ugh, one of
these customers. Great.
"Don't know. Power only tells me what it is and does, not how." One of the pains of dealing with normals was that you had to frequently explain that powers aren't magic. An unfortunately regular pain of mine since the war started in Manhattan again.
Things had been going so well too, what with the disappearance of the Butcher and near driving out of the Teeth. The prosperity that followed had been such a breath of fresh air that what happened next probably should have been expected. A fleet of Risk airships dropped down from space and started blowing the Upper East Side to smithereens before the air force finally took them down, it was the most destructive event the city had seen since Behemoth. It was also the source for most of this Tinkertech salvage that my clients kept finding and bringing to me to identify.
I lit another cigarette as I briefly looked over the mangled mess that my four o'clock appointment brought in. "This is a badly damaged, magnetically-fired automatic ballista and a bit of its nickel-tungsten-copper ammunition. It's supposed to be loaded with nine of these rods and charged up with magnetic fields to fire, after that happens it's the same as any other arm-sized gun."
"How do I fix it?"
"I 'unno, maybe try some duct tape or something? I'm a Thinker, not a Tinker."
It was also the reason for so much of my frustration these days. With nearly half the city on fire and/or burned down from the repeated sieges by Earth Risk being launched seemingly at random, costs of living had skyrocketed as whole apartment blocks had been bulldozed by both the raids themselves and falling debris from their failures.
Before Sarah had died, we maybe could have weathered the blow to our finances. But she
was dead now, and with her gone so was the more profitable half of our superheroes-for-hire business. Nobody wanted to hire a 'hero' for security whose power had nothing to do with combat itself. Captain Obvious and Major Oversight were a great team, but it was clear who the real breadwinner had been before I was forced to do work with aspiring villains.
I lit up another cigarette. "This is a copper-glass plated Greek fire warhead, somehow perfectly intact despite falling hundreds of feet out of the sky. When it shatters on impact with an object, the fluid inside bursts into flames, the mixture being essentially napalm." With that I had my client's interest. Unfortunately, there were certain grades of items that required a bit of extra lip service for my business to still be somehow legal. "That said, I'm legally required to recommend that you turn this in to city officials rather than proceed to do whatever it is you want to do, mister-"
"No names."
"Of course not, sir." Doing Thinker odd jobs for normals literally masquerading as villains wasn't how I thought I'd be making ends meet, but oh well. Another day another dollar, I guess.
--
6/20/11
PARAHUMAN REPORT #0396357US: "SHRED"
APPEARANCE:
Shred's most common appearance is a skinless, emaciated human male covered with asymmetrical extra limbs.
POWERS:
CHANGER/BRUTE 8: Shred's mutated limbs are capable of shrugging off intense amounts of physical damage before bursting all at once after a threshold of force is met, this bursting does not appear to affect Shred's main body adversely in any way and before long something else will grow in its place. In addition to this, upon biological death Shred's main body is capable of regenerating from any intact clump of viable cells in the area, the smallest known source of regeneration being a severed thumb. It is unknown if there is any range limit to this capability or if Shred has any control over where he will grow from next.
CHANGER/STRANGER 5: Shred is able to infect living human beings and human cadavers with his blood and tissue, allowing him to both take on the appearances of the cadavers when he next regenerates and to inflict debilitating skin conditions in living humans. Once 17 hours have elapsed after infection the only known cures are to shift into a Breaker state that doesn't have biological material to pause the effect and subjecting the victim to sub-zero temperatures for at least 3 hours. Refer to Master/Stranger protocol WhaleSnowcone for the specific measures that must be taken to prevent Shred from taking over the bodies of deceased personnel.
TRUMP 3: Shred is able to use a weaker variant of any powers held by parahumans that his dormant cells infect. It is unknown if this capability has a range or duration limit, so operatives should assume that he has all the same powers as any parahuman that has ever made physical contact with his cells.
AFFILIATIONS:
The Teeth - De Facto leader with the Butcher's disappearance, Shred is thought to have personally killed Hemorrhagia and Vex in a brief skirmish over the power vacuum.
