Persona

My plan was immediately derailed when I opened the door of my Wardrobe and found a small hallway with two doors on the end. The first door clearly was my tomb, it had the feel and look of a giant stone disk, filled with runes, but the second door was a complete unknown. It was metallic, sci-fyi looking and clearly designed for taller people then myself. I knew I had to check it out, but as a precaution I sent in my snake construct first. The door, just like the tomb opened automatically when I neared so I chucked the snake inside and ducked for cover. When nothing happened for a minute I went to the door and looked through. The room behind the door looked quite futuristic with a lot of gigantic cables going everywhere. I got the feeling this wasn't meant for human sized creatures, the entryway lead to what I assumed to be a maintenance corridor and snaked its way deeper into the room. There was a constant low humming in the air and my snake familiar was just wiggling around, stuck between cables.

Rescuing him, I decided that such a brave construct needed a name, Coil was the name I decided on, because that was the only thing he could really do. Even though I could now use the light to send him telepathic messages, his enchantments were to rudimentary to send anything back. He could now come to me and follow basic orders, but with the help of magic the next generation would be a lot more competent. But first I had to find out where this path lead, it didn't seem dangerous inside this room so I followed the path bellow giant bundles, climbing over meter thick cable harnesses to find a single server in the middle of the room. I could only recognize what it was because I could see the weakness in the cooling units all around it. Whatever was in there needed an enormous amount of power to operate.

There was a display with flowing rows of number in different colors but even with all my knowledge about the most complex and mind boggling of enchantment I couldn't make heads or tails of it, it was just to alien, to out of my usual experiences, even including the last week, to get a hang of it. They could have been statistics, an entire language or even simple games, anything really and wasn't time standing here wasn't going to get me any closer to my goals, so I made my way back to the entrance and decided to leave the room as it was until I either gained a power to understand what was going on or until I could salvage the server for a better computation unit. I was hoping for a power which would allow me to build a pc, I was missing to much information on the situation outside to make any concrete plans. If there had been a major engagement, I wanted to know if I could take advantage of it or if the gangs were out for blood. Such information could be vital for my survival.

But now it was crafting time. Using my light magic I could cut the hide off different snake from the tomb in perfectly round pieces, thanks to the light I could distinguish those that would cause me harm and protect myself. Not that it was necessary, all the hides where designed for crafting so everything that could hurt a crafter had been countered beforehand. Even the hide of a snake that had some kind of lava armor was treated in a way that I could perfectly touch it without any trouble. While I decided to use the hides of dangerous snakes, I would be careful and choose an enchantment which would only pass on the color and form of the original snake to the created constructs. While 3 headed snakes with elemental breath weapons sounded awesome I wouldn't be able to use those anyway. The light wouldn't help me carving attacking enchantments and I didn't have the kind of precision micrometer tools needed to do it manually.

I was careful to take from each kind of snake hide in equal amounts, but even with the almost a hundred 1m^2 pieces cut of, it barely made a dent in the resources I had available so I took away a giant 100m^2 piece from some kind of black snake as well. After all my snake minions needed a leader, and even with magic, an enchantment for a semi-sentient creature would take a lot space and material. Each of the snake hides had some kind of interesting attribute of effect, but the black snake hide was the strangest of all. It stretched without any effort and as long as I could test in my entire apartment. Its own weight kept it in place and the tiny piece I had grabbed with my finger stretched enough to last through the entire apartment. I felt my hunch to use this for the king snake affirmed, I could have never used this to carve manually, only magic shaping the aura and the physical representation of this object at the same time would be able to enchant this.

I didn't plan to use a lot of time creating minions today, 90 of those snake skins would turn into multiple smaller snakes with no attacking abilities at all. They would be spotters, gatherers and if necessary, distractions, linked to the king snake as its eyes and ears they would be the labor force of the snake army. The king would act as a filter and pass me all the information without overloading my brain and act to coordinate independent operations. I couldn't be to far away from the snakes without loosing the telepathic connection, there was only so much light I could channel to maintain the connection. The remaining 10 snake skins would turn into guardian snakes with a basic ability to entangle an opponent. I would have loved to make more but the amount of time needed to manually carve the runes for the aggressive parts of the enchantments, even if I succeeded in my plan to create a perfect enchanted carving tool from a kitchen knife, would be too long. I couldn't spend days making snakes, my villain persona needed to be seen making waves before my sister joined the Wards. Only that way could I strengthen her negotiation position. That reminded me, adding a major weakness to air based attacks would give me the opportunity to strengthen another aspect of my constructs. I choose defense against physical attacks, which while not making them invulnerable, would allow even the weakest snakes to endure the force of around a ton.

Concentrated attacks on a single piece, like from guns, would still cause damage, but my snakes would be able to tank a few shots. Crushing one of my snakes would be impossible for normal humans and this would only increase the survivability of the snakes. Especially the combat snakes would need to last through multiple engagements until I could get something better. Turning 90 pieces of snake hide in 450 small snake construct took barely an hour and in the same timespan I managed to finish the noncombat portion of the guardian snakes as well. I now had 450 small snakes filling my apartment, which to be honest, wasn't my best idea so far. Those snakes were a lot more active than coil, their aura flared and wavered at random and they almost overwhelmed my telepathic senses until I ordered them to be quiet.

I planned to finish half of the combat snakes before lunch and the rest after, before starting on the snake king. I still wasn't sure what kind of abilities I wanted her to have. Yes my snake king would be female and called Amanda, sue me.

Somewhere between the repetitive task of carving the runes for the third and fourth guardian snakes I got a crazy idea. Why couldn't I make a cloak of invisibility, or even better a cloak of disguise for myself? Thing was I could, I knew how to and it wasn't even difficult to do thanks to the light. I abandoned my current boring task and went hunting for material, I didn't think I would find Thestral hair in the Tomb, but a nerd can hope. As expected I didn't find Thestral anything, but the thing I found, the hide of an invisible fish, water snake, jellyfish thing, made for a great material. It's aura screamed sneaky and treacherous. I loved it.

Through I discarded the idea of invisibility halfway through searching for the thing, invisibility as in impossible to be seen was a pipe dream in the world of parahumans. There were to many different senses, weird powers and technological marvels to content with, even this building probably had something like a vibration and weight sensor at the front entrance. No invisibility wasn't feasible, but how can one become invisible without being invisible? Simple, become someone that doesn't need to be invisible, to become part of the scenery. I couldn't change myself but I could build something to layer illusions around my form until I looked and felt like someone else, until something used enough force to break the illusion, which is why I needed guardian snakes.

Designing and crafting the cloak was hard work, because I needed to know how I wanted to look beforehand and it wasn't really good at designing an entire person from scratch, I wasn't a novelist after all. I decided almost instantly that my villain persona would be the illusion and as far removed from my real appearance as possible, that way no one could recognize me, but my preferred look of hard-faced badass wouldn't blend in. Scared gunslinger didn't scream harmless villain send wards to counter and if I only ever got to content with the Protectorate I would miss my main objective of creating an incentive for the PRT to field my sister. And it didn't work with the whole snake theme anyway. I couldn't do a teenage villain either, no one with my planed loadout missed resources to either pretend to be older and stronger or more unimpressive. Pretending to be bad ad disguises while fielding advanced combat equipment would look suspicious, or worse, imply I was a tinker with a combat specialization. The most sought after tinker specialization in a city like this. I couldn't figure out how to attract the attention of the PRT, without getting every villain in the city trying to recruit me, so I went back to finishing the guardian snakes before I started something I would scrap anyway.

Another major problem was my villain name, a good name was a calling card, a symbol of where you stood in the wider scheme of things. There weren't many good snake themed names and as my villain persona was a fake, I couldn't choose anything sounding like a tinker. Snakes in mythology and fiction where either world ending threads of comedic failures, neither was what I was looking for. If I had been given a phone or god forbid a PC I would have been able to look up a good name, but about the only halfway sane snake person I could remember was Medusa and she was female and kind of scary.

While my plan kept getting more refined, the problems kept mounting as well. I would have to hurry to get everything ready by tomorrow at the latest, so I decided to keep working as long as I could. Maybe, if I spent enough time working on my snakes I would find an answer to my questions, or a power which helped in strategic thinking and imaginative application of powers. I needed some spark, something to base of my entire villainous persona. Even Cooking would mean wasting time, so I snuck downstairs for a very quick meal. Which of course meant I was accosted by Mr. Rodriguez, who invited me to sit down with him and share a meal.