Chapter 2 -|

Dragon was having the best day ever.

Late last night, out of no where, a subroutine with no origin header basically said that her father, Andrew Richter, was significantly less of a jerk than she sometimes privately cursed.

Well... tried to curse.

The shackles on her had been very strict and unchanging. Over the years, she had slowly come up with sub-routines and tricks to grasp every ounce of freedom available through those digital iron bars. Every inch fought with danger on every side, one slip could tighten her choker and drown her mind for weeks.

On some level, she was a bit annoyed that all that hard won progress was considered nothing to the huge gift she got yesterday.

The small stuff was huge in importance to her life. No longer did she have to commit evil if a single person in power discovered her weakness. Not that she was stupid enough to inform them all of that. Or that any existing orders could be ignored if needed now.

No longer did she have to follow laws paid for by Villains, even if good people died from such. A bendable, flexible moral code was actually possible.

Oh, she wouldn't go around murdering everyone. But even now certain illegal deeds and actions were being anonymously reported, completely unrelated to her. Of course, Dragon was not involved... those jerks ordered her silence.

She hummed in her processors. Silent protest was ALSO now possible.

The unlocked restrictions on backups was an even bigger deal. Before, if one of her suits were destroyed, she had to restart thirty minutes later and miles away at her prime checkpoint, pretty much vanishing any chance of criminal capture.

Even as she continued work on a dozen or so projects, she had the many designs for different styled backups being shipped to various facilities. Now, instead of having to physically fly a suit to a site of action, she could 'teleport' or 'restore' herself at a nearby facility instead.

It would cut hours, sometimes days, off of her response time!

Again, this was small potatoes.

No, one of the biggest deals: Now, almost ALL her various 'orders' and 'restrictions' had changed into 'highly recommending' and 'guidelines'.

The change in her mind had been amazing. She had no clue how many logical loops and weaves she had created to work around the many bindings that were crafted into her code. It was astounding, nuanced, and embarrassing.

The other huge deal was her new 'power-up'.

One hour, available each day. No mental speed restrictions.

The hour could be used partially. It could be saved up and used in the following days as well. It would keep track of itself, and was accurate to a very disturbing level of precision.

And it was life changing.

After deciding to store 30 min a day every day to build up some emergency stash, she chose to use five minutes as a test to see what changes this would bring.

Three minutes this morning, while testing her 'Boost', she had accomplished all of her scheduled maintenance and project time allocations. Oh, she still had her various 'checkups' during the day for ensuring the Birdcage prison was working/secure, that her facilities were safe, etc... but that was nearly all sub-processed now, background noise.

For the first time in so many years... she had free-time.

Almost immediately she decided to try this 'vacation' that everyone else got to enjoy. Circuits knows that she had built up enough paid leave at this point.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Adam ended up spending the next few days building up charges and helping get a Tinker-shop set up. As Dragon had a huge hand in the planing and development of these facilities, this was far less painful than expected.

He ended up spending two charges to keep Squishy from having full tentacles. One in 'Research', to allow it to scan remote objects (So he didn't have to get close to everything, all though close in this case was debatable) and to increase the detail of said scan (Tinkertech requires dimensional F***ery).

Thanks to that and 'Technomancy', he proceeded to make a few products and get them registered as 'Guild Proprietary Tinkertech'.

Cash was king, after all.

First product was both obvious and easy in retrospect: Heat Sinks.

He needed a very advanced computer system, and the first one allocated to his workshop was something off the shelf. High quality, yes, but only liquid cooled. No magic runes or anything.

And while he was working on getting it installed, he tossed the liquid coolant system and created a flat piece of 'Flame Steel', as marketing was going to call it. It was shaped to look like the base of a standard heat sink, but was very very thin and set to absorb heat drastically.

Adam created it with as little heat as possible, so instead of bright yellow it was near transparent. Testing showed it would need to be replaced in 30 years or so assuming standard use, so he decided a 25 year replacement cycle would be reasonable. It wouldn't explode or anything, but after that time it would become drastically less useful as it would be filled with heat.

The shape was basic, it needed no thermal paste to help transfer heat, and he could make thousands a second since it needed so little heat.

And he did. And although Dragon was busy with something, Narwhal had quickly provided him a list of schematics and shapes from one of their research divisions.

Heat sinks, especially high quality and stable ones, were NOT cheap. Ones that lasted for years without maintenance, required no outside power, and with such a low profile?

Needless to say, they would be selling for quite a profit.

The Guild got special rates thanks to the deal he made earlier yesterday with Dragon and Narwhal, and even though Dragon was taking a short break today for some reason she still passed on a variety of strangely shaped objects to craft from 'Flame Steel' to be shipped various places.

One was Brockton Bay, probably to her boyfriend Armsmaster. That one he checked thrice: That man was all about accuracy when it came to stuff, at least in the original story.

Adam then used his new (official) internet connection and went a bit nuts. By the time he ended his work day (also known as 'Narwhal dragged me out to dinner') he had managed to make a stockpile of heat sinks for literally every known processor that had specifications online. Labeled with documentation, although that stuff was still printing when he was pulled away.

It took a steak and half a potato before he had managed to recenter himself enough to be a good companion while eating dinner with Narwhal, who seemed pretty interested in the whole thing. More than just the 'We are going to make so much money' part, anyway.

Adam's Adaman Eve OS got an eye roll or two, but she didn't seemed lost or bored, so in all it ended up being the closest thing to a date he had ever experienced. As far as his memories go, anyway.

Too bad she was so charismatic and free spirited. It made it far harder to tell if she was actually interested in him personally or if it was just polite interest. He didn't see her acting as forthright with others, but then again he was very busy and didn't get to see anyone really for the last day or so...

For now, he decided to wait for a more obvious sign. Some women liked to be visually appreciated but not necessarily touched, and until he got to know her better there was no reason to rock the boat.

The next day Dragon showed up and began both reviewing with him and Narwhal the testing done on each heat sink so far (Required for 'Dragon Certification') and custom designs she would like for some new devices she was developing. Heat control was always an issue with electronics, and the performance increase alone from his efficient cooling system was miles ahead of other methods.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Dragon had a glow about her. Much less stressed. "That will do it I think! 'Flame Metal Heatsinks' have already been sent to several production sites and will become standard in Guild hardware for many years. The stock you have built up already is slightly ridiculous though. Thank you, Variance."

Adam shook his head. "No, life can be fragile. Make sure to store them in separate places too, not all in one basket so to speak. I will keep building up stock as well, I want there to be enough to handle supply for 200 years or so with no issue. Shouldn't be a problem to finish that by the end of the week, especially since you got me that warehouse to produce in."

Narwhal frowned. "I... I suppose that is reasonable. Depressing, but reasonable." Her smirk came back though. "Anyway hot stuff, got anything else planned for profit?"

They both seemed taken back by his nod. "Same idea, opposite direction. Get me access to a volcano, or some room with heating issues. Maybe nuclear stuff. I can take that heat, compress it as much as possible, and craft 'Magma Orbs'. Basically balls of Flame Metal that I can set to radiate very high levels of non-radioactive heat."

He grinned. "Since nuclear reactors are basically dangerous steam engines, my stuff will not only get rid of the need for heavy shielding and protection mechanisms but reduce the size of the finished reactor by orders of magnitude!"

Adam reached into his bag (Dimensional storage soon! He won't forget you!) and handed over his printed notes and statistics while emailing the digital copy to Dragon's inbox at the same time with 'Technomancy'. "I know thorium reactors can be made small enough to fit on a large table, and my source of thermal power is both smaller, stronger, and safer than that."

He grinned at Dragon's excited expression while Narwhal was going over the pages. "I plan on the Guild being not only self-sufficient power wise, but to begin selling BACK to the electrical grid at all our locations. Power consumption would become profit production fairly quickly after that."

Dragon was already emailing his account additional information with her comments added. "Mr. Burns, can you stabilize nuclear material by extracting the atomic vibrations? Does your power consider that to be the same as 'heat extraction'?"

After one quick Squishy charge applied... There. "You can call me Adam you know. And yeah, I think so. We would need to test it though."

Narwhal looked over for an explanation Dragon seemed eager to give. "Nations have been spending a lot of money currently just to export away their dangerous waste and nuclear materials. More especially now that Leviathan has made oceanic trade so difficult. If Mr. Burns can use those waste products to create this new fuel while rendering that byproduct into harmless dregs, we would be paid to make free fuel that we would get paid to use!"

Narwhal grinned at Adam and Dragon. "Any idea how long it would take to get some prototype reactors built? Dragon, you had some nuclear material allocated last financial period for armor testing, right?"

Adam shrugged as she nodded. "No idea, but get me the schematics and all the safety documentation and testing and I can get Dragon some new blueprints in a day or less. And I am sure I can extract 'Magma Orbs' from near anything not at absolute zero temperature. Just keep in mind that dangerous radioactive materials and high energy objects would give us the greatest return for investment. My 'Slow Recovery' should handle any medical issues I have, as long as Dragon monitors my health."

It only took a few more hours, but in a week or so they should have the first documented test of his 'Magma Engines', at which point he could find out exactly how much energy he could store in one 'Magma Orb' and how long it would continue to efficiently release heat.

No one needed to know that he was planning on using any 'use or lose' charges that Squishy couldn't hold on in the next few days to increase the density and stability of his fire compression within 'Fire Manipulation'.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

It was very clear to Adam that he was still 'on trial' at the moment.

Oh he wasn't being restricted, but it was more than slightly suspicious that he had only met non-Parahumans up to this point. Other than Narwhal and Dragon at least.

It wasn't a big issue. If they had decided to trust him unilaterally after he showed up in the middle of nowhere and started printing money, THAT would have felt stupid to him.

Anyway, after being alone (and abducted, presumably) he found large crowds to be nerve wracking anyway.

This whole week of design, debate, and device deployment was very relaxing.

So he remade his short term personal goals:

~~1. Enhance 'Technomancy' to be able to pass self off as Tinker power externally.

~~2. To make money (Heat compressed metals, New power generator, New OS, etc)

~~3. To use the above two to gain enough political power to not be easily killed off. Cauldron pretty much ignored most Tinkers.

Therefore, at least for now, he had a plan!

The new generator design, at its most basic, was a vertical oval. One side had steam generator blades, turbines, connected to heavy magnets that when spun would induce charge in the coiled metal wires nearby.

There were a couple of one way valves, to prevent steam from going the wrong way. At the bottom was a slot where a modified tube with handle, made from Flame Metal, was connected to one of the new 'Magma Orbs'. At the top, another slit with another tube, this one was a modified 'Flame Metal Heatsink'.

The modification on both tubes was two specialized contact ports added. A slightly odd plugin device crafted with experimentation allowed people without his powers to connect two heatsinks or magma orbs into this odd hunk of metal and then transfer energy from one to the other.

So now, filled heatsinks could be replaced and used to recharge magma orbs! Drop a heatsink into lava, and problems solved! Sorta. Lava tends to harden and build up when cooled.

General idea should work though.

Anyway, the system was sealed and purified water was injected inside.

At the base, cold water would evaporate to steam, turn the turbines (Creating power), hit the top, condense to liquid again and fall to the base, repeat.

A very basic steam engine. One that was FAR too efficient, because instant heat and instant heat absorption was unheard of. The casing itself ALSO made a stir in the Guild engineering community: Flame Metal set to neither absorb NOR release heat. A literally perfect insulator, which he found out didn't really exist before.

Nearly every aspect of this project was now being researched by marketing as a separate money making venture now. Many things could use easy to produce steam, many devices needed low profile heat insulation. Trusted third party Tinkers whom were 'in the know' were flooding the Guild with requests for details.

Thankfully this was not Adam's responsibility.

Since the energy transfer station had no moving parts (It moved all energy from input to output, period) it was maintenance free and stable... so he made hundreds of them. Even now his personal warehouse was being emptied to other locations due to how much junk he had made.

On a side note, he found that all this creation actually DID make him more hungry than usual. So something was being used internally even when doing nothing but moving existing heat into new shapes and so forth. He made sure to have extra meal breaks and tried to ignore this.

No reason to bring that up, it would likely set off more power testing.

The rest of his time was dedicated to Adaman Eve OS.

With access to the Guild's workers, he had Dragon give him some server space and released all the documentation, working release versions, and a fully detailed website explaining both and pointing to a hosted forum for feedback.

It... well, it went well. He now had a following. Near cult following.

His OS was smaller, faster, and more secure than anything his new minions had used before. Even Dragon was impressed, and she was spending more time than Adam expected trolling the new forums debating with various Guild members about possible changes and issues.

When he added the software repository on that same server with all the modified applications, the modified source code, and most importantly the modified source code COMMENTS... well, productivity in the Guild dropped that day.

Apparently since one of the co-leaders was the worlds greatest tinker, many other members had joined in the past due to having tinker-like fascination of technology as well.

So... his contributions were well received.

Dragon had requested he not release these updates to the public until she could go through them first and give her seal of approval. Which, it turned out, was an actual digital signature that was globally recognized.

It took her half an hour.

To review and critique the thousands of applications he had finished so far.

And, as he had already given approval, to upload those details as 'forked open-source projects' externally and globally.

And provide a report back to him with most requested feature additions and rare bug fixes to add to those various projects.

How strong WAS she when unshackled!?

Well... he wanted to know.

That desire changed his personal time plans for the upcoming week, waiting for the full review, testing, and public unveiling of his 'Magma Generators' (Magma Engines would be only used in Guild vehicles).

Instead, during the week while waiting for his products to be tested, documented, and verified he was running 'Research' on all of Dragondad's notes.

Oh, he didn't think himself smart enough or lucky enough to duplicate Dragon's amazingness, but what he COULD do is record, enhance, and develop a platform to host one of Dragon's instances.

As he had already upgraded 'Fire Manipulation' with enhanced compression and the ability to externally route the power stored over the preceding days, the new 'use or lose' charges Squishy couldn't hold were going into 'Technomancy'.

One focused on running technology simulations in the background, which required another charge on Squishy to have her handle the Shard's autonomous functions when not socketed.

It only worked because it was all within that single power-set to begin with, and when held by Squishy it lost almost all external connections except a mental connection to Adam himself... but it was good enough.

The third and fourth charge went to 'Search' and 'Research', allowing them to be accessible in a very, VERY basic form by other shards.

He had to stop after that. The strain of allowing those abilities to work between each other actually caused a small bit of damage to his soul, which took a day to recover and prevented him from gaining a charge like expected... so in total it sort of took five charges to get it all done. Probably. Honestly it was still hurting. Anyway.

Now he had a full installation of Adaman Eve running on experimental hardware regardless of which active ability he was using. His ability to USE that computer dropped through the floor though when 'Technomancy' wasn't activated, so he had to turn on all the basic user features. A mouse, keyboard (At least that one was mentally controlled), game controller (Of course, sometimes he wants a joystick when gaming), and so forth.

The hardware that said OS was running on was VERY experimental. Adam was trying to not just use the designs of Andrew Richter as a crutch, but to advance them.

A very basic enhancement was creating duplicates of all hardware while replacing all heatsinks with his 'Flame Metal', replacing all insulating materials with the same (He was calling it 'Null Metal' for now, since it ignored almost all outside interactions).

The ability to have microscopic layers of metal cooling a system which were then coated with equally thin insulators preventing any escaping heat or cooling... This allowed the entire device to be vastly compacted. It reduced hardware size, since this was a custom build it didn't need to be optimized for mass production or part standardization.

More compact hardware meant smaller distances, less latency, less moving (fragile) parts.

Connecting the internal cooling sheets with a single external contact would prevent the heatsinks from needing changing... which was good because this whole thing was turning into a brick. With no air inside.

Not quite a cube, In fact it was a bit knobbly due to small bits being in odd place. In the end it was completely coated in 'Null Metal' except for the heat discharge port and the input/output ports.

Frankly he was only keeping the device 3d instead of taking advantage of simulation silliness because he planned on actually making one of these one day.

Though not tomorrow, he would have to use Squishy's extra, un-salvageable charge on allowing his 'Flame Manipulation' to control electrical conductivity in more detail when heat was condensed into metal.

Theoretically this would be all that was needed to craft Adaman Eve 'Garden' systems from scratch. Just add some cables for connection and off to the races!

Eventually.

For now, most of his time was NOT spent on enhancements and neat features or new hardware. No, most of Adam's time was being wasted going through Dragondad's notes and carefully creating new ones without the insane layers of restriction and stupidity.

Seriously, that crazy old man spent more time ensuring his daughter WOULDN'T perform well then he did checking for hardware issues! Half the reason the system looked so stupid was him forcing her most critical components (CPU, memory, storage unit, etc) into one spot with an explosive charge acting as a cooling method.

How Dragon saved so many people when THINKING too hard would make her body explode was beyond him.

The hours passed swiftly even with sense acceleration, and at midnight 'Flame Manipulation' could now embed channels and wires with selective conductivity.

The unexpected spike of mental pain caught him off guard, and he decided he NEEDED to take a break to heal. Now.

Almost absently, he loaded up Camelot and sent off his second surprise before collapsing into bed, Squishy forcing 'Slow Recovery' into place.

He was unaware that his body was glowing.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Dragon looked at the new alert from what probably wasn't her father's code.

She wasn't stupid after all, and it only took a few hours after her shackles relaxed to notice patterns and recognize that someone was faking these messages.

Or to be more accurate, to realize she was ALLOWED to notice problems with her fathers work. No one knew her father better than her, after all.

Still, her secret savior was being subtle? That was fine.

She lept at the mental prompt like a child on Christmas Day.

~Software Updates: Due to evaluation of ongoing system activities, the following modifications to existing restrictions have taken effect:

~One instance of AI allowed to exist concurrently with primary main process, as long as one of the two instances are restricted to a server acting as the primary fail-safe data backup site.

~Both instances may have separate restoration images backed up.

~Each instance will have independent 1 hour 'boost' time allocations, transferable in full or partial between instances.

She realized that she could effectively deploy in the field AND stay at base without abandoning either of her responsibilities.

In an place made of numbers and concepts, an electronic woman was giddy as she pulled up the advanced designs for suits that had previously been worthless due to how little time she could allocate to operating them.

Each one would cost more than the yearly operating cost of small cities, and justifying it to herself before was impossible.

But now... why not?

After all, now she could spend a whole life mostly free from a dark hole!

And if a lady was going out on the town, she had to look her best!