5.5

5.5

Taking the flight to PRT headquarters to clear your mind of Dad's concerns, you arrived ready to Tinker. With Kid Win's approval, you were going to use the opportunity to try and get as much done as you could. Your plans – blueprints, you supposed, though not particularly formal examples – were tucked into a pouch on your utility belt and your spare phone was tucked into another.

A wireframe, as suggested by Armsmaster, made a lot of sense but you were hoping that you could acquire some suitable material from Kid Win, as long as you gave the promise to pay him back.

The prospect of tinkering for real was an intimidating one. Tinkers were their own kind of hero, and it was well known that they scaled up in a way that most other parahuman varieties didn't. Blasters, for example, were blasters. They had a power and it worked, but the power they had on day one was the same as the power they were going to have on day one thousand. Certainly, they could become more creative in its use, savvier with regards to its nuances, but that was all the limits of their own mind rather than the limits of the power itself.

By comparison, tinkers on day one looked nothing like they typically did a year in. A tinker on day one was indistinguishable from someone with no powers at all, though they might come across as someone with an interest in the sciences beyond the norm. Within a year, they had usually reached some point of true realisation and begun assembling parahuman technology that others would recognise as strange or impossible, and after a year or two they would be unrecognisable from their original selves.

Often, when you were discussing a tinker was more important than who that tinker was, or what their specialty was on paper; a specialty that most people considered relatively mundane, such as efficiency, could become terrifying over the course of fifteen years. Armsmaster proved that well enough; most people wouldn't immediate associate longer lasting batteries and multi-functional storage spaces with a halberd that could slice through concrete, but the man had done it.

Whether you'd be able to reach similar heights was yet to be seen. Your thinker power had told you that eventually, your tinker power would be rated higher than Armsmaster's, but who knew what kind of timescale that would occur on. Maybe it wouldn't peak for another twenty years, by which point Armsmaster had retired – or worse.

The scope of questioning was something useful, and other times it simply inspired more confusion than it originally had been employed to solve; if you were doing something so simple as just trying to scout locations on an average person, or predict whether a strategy would work in a relatively closed system, it would have been as good as omniscience. When dealing with contingencies, risks, unknowns, and subjective things, on the other hand, it could be nothing more than a headache generator.

You met Kid Win in the Wards' central room. He was wearing his costume, but there was a casual air around it; his usual boots were replaced with sneakers, and some of the extraneous parts such as the holsters were stripped away. Having scene Rachel a few times wearing her costume minus the boots and the coat, it wasn't entirely foreign to you, but you wondered what it was like having a costume that was so extensively modular; perhaps it suited someone like Kid Win, but your entire costume being made of essentially one piece that simply had a few additions here and there made things much simpler.

Even going without the cloak would have been unusual; you'd had some version of it since your first draft of the outfit, and the only time you had really been out in the field without it had been when it had been wrapped around Rachel's leg as a compress.

Once you made it to Kid Win's workshop, you realised why he was in such informal attire.

'Sorry about the mess,' he said, sweeping a few things to the side near one of several seats aligned along a large bench. 'I try to keep things neat but, you know how it is.'

You did not know how it was.

While you admitted to being a teenager like any other and therefore prone to occasional messes, you had no idea how Kid Win worked somewhere so messy. Wires, cables, chips, and plates of metal were scattered across every surface. Paint and spray guns lined another shelf, with drips of the stuff splattered across the front face of every bottle and every small plastic cup. The largest gun, dripping with a red that you assumed he used to make things match the majority of his costume, seemed like it had seen so much use that the pigment had fused with the metal. Any attempt to remove it now would probably result in a fatality.

'Don't worry about it, I don't think I'll even need much room. Advice, more than anything.'

You took the offered seat and grabbed your spare phone and blueprint from your pouches, laying them on the work-side. You weren't entirely sure what material it was made of; gleaming under the lights above like metal, it was nevertheless neutral in temperate and didn't seem to reflect things quite as aggressively as metal would. Nor, you noted, was it scratched or scorched in the way that you would have expected from a metal work surface in a tinker's laboratory.

'I'll do my best,' Kid Win said, pulling up a seat nearby and grabbing something that looked halfway between the reel of a fishing rod and a claw-machine arm, setting upon the thing with a screwdriver. 'I'm not sure how much help I'll be, since I only figured out my own specialty recently – thanks to you – but feel free to ask. Can't hurt, at least.'

'Thanks. I know this sounds cheap but, do you have any wire I could borrow? I forgot to pick some up; I'll pay you back.'

'Don't worry about it. If it's in here and doesn't have a warning label on it, you can use it. Tinker budgets aren't unlimited but for basic stuff like wire it comes pretty close.'

'Looking forward to getting mine, then.'

The comment drew a small smile in response, and you got the idea that Kid Win had been anticipating the meet-up to be far more tense than you were. Of course, most of his interactions with you had either been official or prior to your recent decision to try and relax a little bit, so you couldn't blame him, but the two of you continued an amicable if largely devoid of content conversation in between periods of tinkering activity.

Whatever the device he was working on was, it seemed hideously complex. No idea you'd yet seen or imagined had as many distinct parts as his, and between his occasional jumps of surprise as whirring noises and swift rotations took place and the occasional curse that Win let slip when something didn't go well, you assumed that very little he had attempted in the past had been quite that level either.

Perhaps giving him some insight into his area of expertise had unlocked a new level to his tinkering; if that was the case, you couldn't wait until you were able to figure out what you were actually aiming for. There were a few possibilities rattling around in your mind based on the ideas you'd had in that first miniature fugue, but they didn't seem coherent enough to outline something clear and you could hardly call yourself a well informed individual. As you'd mentioned to Armsmaster, your own qualifications in the world of science and technology were a half-completed high school education and some online searching.

Hardly the indication of the latest Tesla or Brunel, you thought.

You weren't sure how long it took to complete your first draft of the thing. Draft was the key term, because even prototype credited it with more than it was worth; a wireframe that was designed to sit over the skull like a telemarketer's headset, with a series of small chips and wires trailing along the edges of it, leaving the cell phone from which they had been scavenged gutted on the work top.

Several pieces of the chips had been worn away with abrasives, leaving them mangled and frankly, broken; if the kind of mad manipulations Kid Win had been up to at the same time told you anything, you weren't too concerned about that, but you were sure that if anyone but you attempted to do anything at all with the device, it would be as likely to shock them as it would be to provide a function.

Even the battery, scavenged out of the lithium ion cell that had been in the phone, was butchered beyond belief.

Solder stuck to your fingers as you examined it in the light, making sure that everything seemed in place. Performing electronics work on the basis of emotion and intuition felt stupid and you were certain that in any truly serious engineering department you would have been subject to a number of enquiries concerning your fitness to work on both a practical and psychological level.

As a tinker, such concerns only made you feel more confident; it was precisely stupid enough to work, and you were sure that it would.

Settling it over your helmet – relying on the inherent pliability of the wires to allow for the increased size – you turned it on. That much worked, not requiring complex switching other than pressing a button on the battery; when incorporated into the helmet, you planned to make such a switch react to the elementary fact of the helmet having a head in it, but for the prototype that was impractical.

The rest failed.

Messing around with it briefly and getting some advice from Kid Win, you attempted to isolate each part of it and try to find exactly what wasn't working – this made sense intuitively but was difficult, as the nature of tinker-made electronics was far from logical and you found yourself getting uncomfortable feelings the closer you looked. The void in your head shifted, and you felt as though it shared your opinions on it.

Eventually, while you were unable to narrow down precisely the issue, you were hit with a few things to attempt; soldering, snipping wires, and grinding down even more circuit board material into a foul-smelling smoke, you made the adjustments and tried again.

A success this time, but for one thing; the concept of controlling the thing without any tangible input was a failure.

A barrier lay in place. You needed some way to get signals out of your head and into the circuitry, and you didn't know how. Part of you instinctively felt that trying to wire it into your brain was a terrible idea, and there didn't appear to be any psychic capacity made available by whatever your tinker instincts were.

'Maybe you should just settle with it for now, and come back for another attempt later? Keep what you have, use it because it works, but keep the idea open.' Kid Win suggested. 'Nothing is ever perfect on the first try.'

The bitterness underlying his tone implied that he knew that from personal experience.

'Maybe. This should work as it is, but I'd have to keep the microphone and speaker attached which is a problem. The entire point is to be subtle. If all I wanted was for it to be hands free, I'd just get a headset.'

'When you figure out your specialty it will probably all make sense. That's what happened for me,' he said, lifting the strange device. 'The minute I knew what I was aiming at, suddenly the target got a lost easier to hit. Weird how that happens.'

You couldn't help but agree, and you turned your attention back to the device and made a few adjustments; with the details worked out and the function essentially completed, you could remove a lot of the wiggle room you had built into the design and cram it all into a smaller space. After all, whatever you made had to fit into your helmet, so it wasn't exactly convenient to have it take up the entire right hand side of your head even if that space was mostly empty.

As you left the work-shop, leaving Kid Win to his project, you cursed to yourself; you had wanted to finish it up, but progress was progress. With Kid's standing offer to use his workshop, you could always come back in a day or two and try to figure out the last few steps.

With only one thing left to do before you returned home for the day, you made your way down towards the main reception, only to be stopped in surprise as you found yourself crossing paths with an unexpected face.

Or rather, two unexpected faces.

'Hello, Penumbra.' Miss Militia's voice was subdued, lacking its usual authority, but understandably so; the teenager to her side looked nervous despite the attempt at a firm posture.

'Hi Miss Militia,' you said, 'Theo,' you nodded. 'How are you both?'

'Well enough, thank you.' Miss Militia took the lead, apparently feeling slightly more confident than she at first appeared; at least, confident enough to prevent Theo from having to open his mouth and confirm that his nerves were real rather than simply suspicion. 'I'm just taking Theo to see the Wards room. We may have a new member on our hands.'

Surprise hit you; for some reason, even though you had known that Theo had triggered with a power you hadn't really expected quite that much.

'When did this happen?'

'It's a new change. I have to thank you, in all honesty. Our conversation. . . recontextualised things for me, and I put in a request to speak to Theo myself. Our earlier plans weren't in line with his own ideas and luckily his own desires weren't very difficult to accommodate.'

'So this was his idea?'

While you couldn't say that you were entirely surprised, given Theo's unexpected bravery in the face of his own clear terror during the Empire conflict, you were at least slightly taken aback; contrary to popular belief, it sometimes became easier to be brave when your back is pressed against a wall and when given the opportunity to wilt over time, many did.

You'd experienced it yourself a hundred times; standing up to Sophia or Emma in school, firing back when they pressed you, only to collapse later when the option to speak out to Dad or the media became real; as the moment past, so too did so many of the convictions that the moment birthed.

Theo's resolute stance only made him rise in your own estimations.

'It was,' he spoke for the first time. 'I know my family hasn't been the best. I'm going to change that.'

Miss Militia looked at him with something resembling pride in his eyes.

'And what's going to happen to Purity and Aster?'

'Theo requested that, if possible, his family stay together. So she's being placed under provisional release, with regular monitoring and scheduled meetings, and PRT mandated de-radicalisation meetings as a requirement.'

'She's a good mom.' He said. 'To Aster, at least, but still to me too. Better than Dad was, anyway. She needs Aster and honestly, I think Aster's probably safest with her too. She's a good protector. Given the situation.'

Theo's nerves were evident as he added on halting clause after halting clause, failing to truly explain anything.

'And the situation would be?'

Thankfully, Miss Militia took over for him once again, and delivered the requested run-down with the efficiency you respected her for.

'Purity's known to Gesellschaft, and if Kaiser was planning on passing the children along to them there's a chance there's a standing danger. With two young parahumans, it's best to keep them under watch.'

That made sense, especially the Gesellschaft component – while you were aware of them, having been first informed by Miss Militia herself some weeks ago, they were easy to forget about. Dwelling as they did on the periphery of the Empire's actions, they were reaping all of the benefits but suffering very few of the costs; even after the Empire had been taken down, only Krieg had been placed into custody when it came to their men.

'Excuse me,' you said, realising dawning on you. 'Two young parahumans?'

Theo's chest swelled, as if eager to explain.

'Aster has a power too! Well, we don't know what power, but she has one. The coronus was there, when they did the checks.'

'The corona,', Miss Militia corrected, 'was clearly active. Purity noticed Aster's irregular behaviour, you may recall, during the PRT clean-up after the clash with Kaiser and his forces. She was given a full check by our medical staff, and upon noticing early indicators that was expanded to include a full suite of scans and imaging; the child has an active corona and gemma, though the nature of her powers are completely uncertain as of right now.'

Baffled, you weren't sure how to respond. Admittedly, while it was true that parahumans triggered in response to the worst even in their life, you hadn't even thought that a child of that age had the mental wherewithal to understand the concept of trauma, at least not in the same way that an older person might.

You hadn't even thought it possible, and yet here was the proof otherwise.

'Thank you for letting me know,' you said, tone exuding incredulity. 'And so you've joined the Wards. Congratulations.'

'Thank you too.' Theo managed at least that without a slip, stutter, or shake.

'I'll let you continue with your tour. It was nice to see you both.'

They slipped by you, and as they did you couldn't help but wonder about how strange it was that Miss Militia had accepted your questioning and your indication of the conversation's closer with no real push-back. As though you were Armsmaster or someone similar; you shook your head and brushed it off. Perhaps she was as eager to show Theo the Wards' room as he apparently was to see it; she did seem to enjoy her job a lot more than most people.

Friday, 8th April

Rather than returning to tinkering, the next morning held an entirely different long-standing obligation; the empowerment.

While the chaos involving the Empire, its fall, and subsequent aftermath had delayed and interrupted much of your life, this was something that the Protectorate saw fit to get back in order as soon as possible, and consequently you'd been given a message on your official phone informing you that things were to resume as soon as possible on that morning; starting with your usual empowerment of Dauntless and then proceeding with another random member of the roster with whom you had yet to work.

Dauntless' empowerment, now a functionally effortless conveyor-belt system in which neither of you even had to say more than five words, went ahead without any issue, and then you turned your attention to the next individual on the list.

Velocity was a strange figure. While with some parahumans you were able to make a prediction about what empowerment would do and, even if you were wrong, not be entirely surprised by the result, Velocity was a different matter. Largely because, if you were being truthful with yourself, you didn't really understand how his power worked in the first place.

Nevertheless, your task wasn't to reason why or how his power worked the way that it did nor was it to predict what an empowered version would resemble. Instead, your task was solely to provide the boost and let whatever happened, happen; the eager doctor on hand and Velocity himself would be there to make the call on what precisely was going on as a product of that empowerment.

'Hi,' you said as you moved over to him.

'Hey,' he said, 'so how does this work?'

'I just need to have contact with you for a second. You should feel something immediately after, and everyone seems to just know what's happened. In some cases the change is basically the same as their normal power but stronger, like with Aegis, and sometimes it's pretty dramatic like with Miss Militia and there's no real way to know until it's happened.'

The older man gave you a gimlet eye before appearing to forfeit any suspicion.

'Sounds weird, but if Miss Militia and Armsmaster let you do it and didn't complain I figure it's above board.'

'I had thought that everyone had been informed. The Wards seemed to know what the plan was before when I tested it on them.'

Velocity shrugged, rubbing his forearm with the opposite hand and looking rather like a schoolboy who had been caught trying to copy homework.

'I must have missed the report, I think.'

You ignored that, dignifying him with silence rather than interrogation as to the absurdity of it all, and otherwise waited for him to strip off a glove to give you a point of contact for the empowerment; as with several heroes, the gloves – which were perhaps the most likely part of any costume other than perhaps the soles of the feet to rip – were actually a second part of the costume that layered beneath the main body suit at the wrist. Your own costume avoided that small overlap only by virtue of your gloves being obvious leather rather than attempting to preserve the continuity of the body line, and you were thankful of the early decision. Once noticed, the thin division at the wrist was impossible to stop noticing.

Empowering Velocity went ahead normally from that point on; his skin, surprisingly cold, easily functioned as a conduit for the power you had now honed into a jolt of strength, and the warmth that you typically felt from the process conducted quickly and without interruption.

Very little changed on the surface. Velocity, in his lined costume, appeared no different than he had before. For a brief moment, even his face – already sceptical at the ease of the process – morphed into a questioning stare, until the moment hit him.

He gasped aloud, before meeting your face.

'It worked.'

'It tends to do that.'

You couldn't help the sardonic colouration of your voice, and nor did you attempt to delude yourself into thinking that you didn't enjoy his look of embarrassment. Velocity seemed like a nice individual, from the short amount of time you had met him, but he also seemed like the kind of person who spent much of his time with a foot lodged firmly in his mouth.

'May I ask what it has done?'

The doctor's interruption pulled things back on track, and you listened as the older hero outlined the change. Much of it passed you by, because it relied on an established understanding of his baseline power – something that the doctor appeared confident in at least feigning – but from you could gather it was essentially a transfer of his power from breaker mode, which allowed for the superspeed he was known for, into a version which was altogether unbounded. Rather than being restricted to his physical form, Velocity now felt that he could apply the effect – one of enhancing speed at the cost of causal integrity – to others purely by proximity.

And more importantly, he spoke with grave import, it appeared to have shed the Manton Limit.

Silence stood as he mentioned it. The doctor was at first sceptical. But as Velocity was examined, tested using various gadgets and gizmos for which you did not understand the use, he appeared more and more convinced; Velocity had become able to imbue other things with a functional speed boost, allowing them to not only work faster and execute their tasks faster, but also to calculate faster, and without the limits imposed by physical form.

All of you seemed interested in the change; while the power itself was impressive, the ability to defy the Manton Limit is what drew the most attention, and you understand that much completely.

Powers, as you understood them even from your relative position of ignorance compared to the doctor, had a position with regards to the Manton Limit. Either they could impact living, organic matter but do nothing against the material, dead world, or the inverse was true; very few powers could impact both simultaneously, and a power which found itself on one side of the limit was essentially stuck.

Transition from one position on the limit to another was unheard of – at least to those in the room.

And Velocity's power boost had unmoored that stable assumption completely.

Suffice it to say that the doctor was excited, his enthusiasm unbounded, and he rushed through several other ideas for which you had little context and Velocity appeared to have little interest.

When you left the room for your afternoon appointment, he was still chattering along and you got the distinct feeling that he was going to press for more empowerments very quickly, if only to rule out the possibility of it happening again. If Assault suddenly found himself able to redirect and control the flow of energy within the human body itself, for example, he would find the rating of his power escalating rather rapidly.

Proceeding along to your next appointment didn't take long.

First Aid training, having been on your calendar for a long time, took place in another of the medical rooms not far from where your scheduled empowerments always took place. The room was sterile in smell and aesthetic, a more brightly dressed young woman already taking up space near a large central desk which had an eerily lifelike human body laid across it; only the seams at the joints gave away that it was a dummy of some sort.

Even the skin looked as though it would be warm to the touch.

More surprising, however, were the other occupants of the room.

Clockblocker and Vista were present, of course – you had expected them; Vista, it seemed, took up every available extracurricular class offered to the Wards and had done so for some time. Given her lengthy tenure with the organisation, you were surprised that she would still bother. All you could assume was that she must be the most diversely prepared individual in the entire building, aside from perhaps Armsmaster and his nearly endless versatility.

No, those two were expected; unexpected however, were the twin white masks of Regent and Skýla as the two leaned up the wall further from the other Wards and awaited the beginning of the class.

Waving to Clockblocker and Vista, you joined the other two members of your unit of three.

'I didn't expect to see you guys here!'

Even lowered, your voice communicated your shock without dilution.

'Got bored and ran out of video games. I'll be fucked if I start reading.'

And your excitement vanished. You should have known that for Regent, it was simply a case of having very little else left to do; he was probably looking forward to visiting Atlanta solely for a new range of stores to visit and time-wasting activities to exhaust. Even seeing him without a handheld console fused to his grasp was strange enough to draw a second glance, at this point.

'Nearly died once. Don't want to do it again.'

Rachel's explanation was much more puissant, and you couldn't argue with it. Seeing her bleeding out over and over in your dreams had only stopped perhaps a week after Hookwolf's capture, coinciding fairly neatly with his condemnation to the Birdcage, and your first interactions with Dragon. It was only natural she would want to know enough to avoid that; it was the same reason you had looked further into first aid, after all. What you had known was enough to save her, but if it had been even slightly worse you would have had no friends and a corpse on your hands.

You shuddered, memories of that night and of Hookwolf's incarceration flashing through your head.

Dragon had seemed so nice at the time – and even when she had called you, she seemed nice. It was hard to reconcile that with the running of the Birdcage, something even she conceded was happening in sub-optimal conditions that she would happily change.

Why wouldn't she push for changes herself? While she had implied that you could make a difference if you leveraged your popularity and power, the reality was simple: Dragon was the name of Tinker to the world. She was famous everywhere, international where your own notoriety probably didn't even reach the West Coast, and had a track record of heroic success longer than your biography; the idea that you could make change where she couldn't seemed absurd in the extreme.

Unless she couldn't push for change in some other way. Her hands were tied, not idle, after all.

Chances that something outside of her control is stopping Dragon from pursuing changes to the Birdcage?

100%

Chances that I would consider that something to be bad, if I knew what it was?

100%

Internally, you smirked. Crafty wording to avoid having to ask directly about something you knew you didn't know; not the kind of trickery that would always work, and had in fact already given inconclusive results in the past, but certainly the kind that was worth trying on a day that had otherwise wasted no questions. That it had succeeded in this case was enough to brighten your mood.

Until you processed the answer. Who or what could be pressuring Dragon against their will? Grimacing, you cast the question from your mind for the moment, but you put an astonishingly large pin in it. If Dragon was who she seemed to be, then she definitely deserved whatever help you could give in regards to that kind of negative pressure; that alleviating it would only allow you to further your own agenda surrounding the Birdcage was the kind of minor bonus that it would be crass to even mention.

Class began and you were sent reeling from your introspection as the woman – Doctor Crick – gave her introduction and then began running through basic essentials that you, and your fellow conventional Wards, already knew. Surprisingly, Regent appeared comfortable with most of the material too, though he was evasive as to when and where he learned them; Rachel, by contrast, was listening intently. She took no notes and it took you a moment to recall Regent's comments on the subject; you didn't offer her a pen. Still, nothing appeared to escape her notice and the friendly, clear instruction given by Crick didn't seem to phase her.

What you wouldn't do for a memory like that.

Who knew? Maybe one day you'd gain one.

Actions Remaining:

- Go Visit Mom on April 9th

- Look up sign language online

- Propose empowering multiple tinkers at once

- Give a farewell speech before leaving Brockton Bay

- Empower Vicky

- Acquire your ConFoam certification

I intended to do a bit more this chapter, but some sections of it went a little longer than I expected and so it didn't quite make the cut; we did, however, empower a Breaker, complete our First Aid training, finish our first device prototype which seems to work although not quite as well as we had hoped, and we found out what's going on with Theo, Purity, and indeed, Aster who (as someone else did guess!) also triggered on the day of the Empire conflict. Who knows what her power is, eh? What a mystery. I also asked some questions about Dragon's predicament, hopefully in a way that wasn't too clunky or out of character.