5.9

5.9

Thursday, 14th April

Laid on your bed, you looked at the doodle in front of you with a mixture of confusion and disgust.

Waking up early wasn't unexpected. You had wished it didn't happen, but with the prospect of tinkering for Armsmaster and Dragon looming over your head, you could hardly blame yourself for having some trouble in sleeping properly. The idea of it was daunting enough, but knowing that Armsmaster already had some concerns regarding your supposed specialty made it almost scary enough not to bother going. If you were a lesser person you may have even just decided to skip out on things, claiming that you had no inspiration.

But Taylor Hebert was not a lesser person, and while you disliked many things about yourself, one of the few things you took some degree of pride in was the fact that you backed down to nobody and nothing. Call it bravery, call it ego, call it stupidity, it was true.

And so when you woke up at a little past six in the morning and were completely unable to return to sleep, you had taken to trying out one of your new proposed hobbies; grabbing some pencils and a sheet of printer paper you had sketched an outline of a head using what you remembered from middle school art classes, before trying to extend things out into a body. A self-portrait, just because that seemed like the most basic thing.

Very quickly, you learned that it was not the most basic thing.

It had gone wrong rapidly, with the proportions skewing further and further from your initial intent until things no longer even looked fully human. With the long face, fish-like wide mouth with no lips, and weirdly gravity-defying hair, you had attempted to pivot from a self portrait into a sort of dark-fantasy mermaid, littering the thing with cross-hatching in a facsimile of scales and conjoining the legs into a lengthy, muscular flipper.

But it reminded you too much of when you had turned your lower body into a snake's tail to capture Purity, and that only made you grimace. Did you really look that bad?

The entire thing was bad conceptually, and the execution was worse. You knew that people had to practice to get good, but you couldn't even stand looking at it. Grabbing the paper and stuffing it into a draw beneath discarded pens, paper clips, and rubber bands, you hoped never to see it again. What an awful illustration. Perhaps drawing was not the hobby of your future.

Rather than moping about it, however, you decided to try something else. After all, your list of possible hobbies was a long one, and you had a few hours before heading into the PRT made any sense.

When Mom had died, the majority of her books had been put away in the garage. Some of them you'd already dug out – mostly those which concerned rhetoric and similar topics, and you remembered the dull grind of reading through a couple of them when you were trying to establish yourself as a cape months earlier.

Her fiction texts, however, had mostly remained out; the bookcase in the living area, to the left of the television and couch, had been largely untouched since her death. On the downside, the very fact that they had been so thoroughly neglected made you feel ashamed. Mom had, among her many burning passions, a love for literature that you didn't think could ever have dimmed, and you hadn't even really treated her books well since she died. Even if you hadn't had an interest yourself, you and Dad should have kept them in good condition; as it was, you thought there might be more dust than paper on that bookcase.

A positive perspective, though, was that they had never been hidden away in the garage with the other texts and that meant that while late was only better than never, late had arrived.

Pressing your hand to your bedroom wall, you felt yourself absorbed into it. There was something cosy about being inside the structure of your own home, where memories had been made. Whatever else had been true about the last few years, and whatever else had been true about Dad's depression, the reality was that home was a safe space from the terror of Winslow. And before that, it had been legitimately happy.

Slipping through the network of the walls, feeling the electronics buzzing at you but unable to penetrate your brutish resilience, you emerged downstairs next to the bookcase. Without sight, you had ended up further away than you had intended, but the sense of perception you had developed through multiple explorations of your own home rendered navigation easier than one might think, even between floors.

You didn't really know which book to start with, gazing on Mom's old collection. You were right in that it would be covered in dust, but you could still make out the titles on the spine. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 21 Days of the Neurasthenic, The Old Man and the Sea, Ulysses, The Carpathians, The Last Man, The City and The City, Dead Souls, If on a winter's night a traveller, The Red and The Black. Names of books you didn't recognise and a handful that you did were splayed out before you and each one seemed intimidating. Even the slimmer books were books that your mother had held in hand and seen worthy to keep – that meant something to her, and she knew what she was doing.

Wouldn't it be embarrassing to try and tap into her legacy, her field, and get lost in it? You had enjoyed reading as a child but there was a level of difference between the sort of things you had been reading back then and the kind of novels that your Mom collected and the gap seemed insurmountable.

Ultimately, you decided. Taylor Hebert was no coward, after all, and you reached in almost at random and took a book from the shelf; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A book you'd heard of, at least, even if you had never read it. Surprised that it was smaller than you had thought – images of hulking Victorian tomes conjured by its canonical status – you headed back to your room up the stairs, taking the extra time to look over the cover and inspect it.

The hard cover was nondescript, if pleasantly heavy, and you saw that the pages were yellowed. An older copy perhaps? While you didn't know your Mom to collect antiques, she could have easily picked that particular book up second hand somewhere and never known where it came from – or maybe she'd just had it since she was a kid too. That must have been a few decades ago now.

Much of the rest of the morning slipped away. You lounged on your bed, slowly making your way through the relatively dense but delicate prose of the novel, alarmed at how hidden the entire affair was; you'd known from pop culture osmosis that Jekyll and Hyde were the same man, but as the pages went by the author put a lot of effort into keeping the division intact and after the first three chapters there was still scarcely a hint at the true relationship between the two.

Once your alarm went off, however, you were forced to abandon your reading. Perhaps it was just the fact that you were out of practice but you had been surprised by how well the book had gripped you, and you made a promise to yourself to finish it off before you left Brockton Bay – you still had to pack up, after all, so you could make sure to leave that book out of the boxes for now. Even if the PRT was going to help you with the move, the reality was that you and Dad felt that certain things had to be done within the family rather than outsourcing.

As you got kitted out, preparing to head into the PRT, you thought about how much action you had gone through since becoming a cape. The first few weeks had been relatively slow – simply enacting your own personal pursuit of revenge, justified as it may have been, against your school bullies. Even when you had got a costume together and started heading out on patrol, you had done very little at first and after your first disastrous encounter with villainy alongside Glory Girl, you'd done even less as the damage you had caused made you recoil.

Spending the next few weeks training with New Wave and dealing with incidents as they came up, it wasn't until you had clashed with the Undersiders barely a month ago that things had accelerated dramatically, and now it was fair to say that you'd done more in the last three weeks than you had in the three months before it.

With less than a week to go before you left for Atlanta, you wondered to yourself what else could happen. Was Lung simply waiting for your last day so he could explode and put you on a timer?

The thought was silly and you were tempted to dismiss it, but you held yourself from doing so. With the day scheduled out, there wasn't going to be a huge demand on your thinker power – at least, not one you anticipated – and so asking a handful of questions to get things clarified couldn't hurt.

Chances that the ABB make a major move in the next week?

5%

Chances that the ABB make a major move in the next month?

50%

Chances that the ABB seize more territory before the end of April?

78%

With a general overview, at least enough to inform the PRT to be on alert as the month wore on, you were tempted to put the questions away. However, there was a single remaining concern that you couldn't just forget.

The reality was that while you were confident you could take out Lung, you were also sure that any attempt to do so would result in disaster for the city overall – your thinker power had confirmed as much in the past.

So as a result, the obvious question still stood.

Chances that Lung gets in a fight that causes a lot of destruction in the next couple of months?

100%

You sighed. Not exactly the most reassuring of odds but, to be fair, you didn't know what that even meant. You couldn't imagine who would antagonise him, and with you gone, you weren't sure exactly who could push him far enough to cause a lot of destruction. Whatever was the cause, however, you made a mental note to inform the PRT.

With a scheduled meeting with Armsmaster later that afternoon – and better yet, Armsmaster and Dragon – you had ample opportunity to do so.

Delaying tactics over, time expired, you slipped out of the house. Dad knew where you were going, the schedule well established, and so you didn't take the time to interrupt him from the last precious minutes of sleep he would get before he had to head off to his own busy work day. While his smile had remained bright, you could tell that the pressure of finishing up his work at the Dockworkers' Association to his own standards of satisfaction was weighing on his mind.

You arrived at the PRT headquarters and went through the usual motions with a metronome's rhythm, greeting the secretary before proceeding to the medical bay, empowering Dauntless, and then turning to the person in front of you.

You grimaced.

'Clock, what are you wearing?'

'This is a hospital gown. Duh. I'm a patient.'

Thankfully, the teenager was wearing his usual costume beneath it, but the image of Brockton Bay's resident troll Ward wearing the untied gown was going to haunt several of your nightmares in the weeks to follow and you could hardly blame yourself for that; there were things you could imagine less appealing, but they didn't number in the thousands.

'So, what's my boost going to do?'

'I don't know,' you answered, slipping off your glove. 'It just happens and then you tell us what the change is, if there is one. There's no guarantee it does anything different or new either. Dauntless' boost just gives him another turn, basically.'

'Oh. Well that's pretty lame honestly. I thought we might be able to choose. I'd love to be able to get a blaster version – right now I have to touch stuff to freeze it and that's a problem sometimes.'

You could imagine; Clockblocker had that wonderfully frustrating combination of a power that was actually extremely powerful alongside usage requirements that made it impractical in most of the situations that would benefit from it. With his time-freeze, as far as you knew, anything could be frozen in its tracks; as long as he could touch it.

Imagining the boy trying to lay a finger on an Endbringer or on a rampaging Lung to freeze them was a little bit like imagining a poison dart frog being thrown into a crocodile's mouth. Yes, maybe it would ruin the crocodile's day, but that frog was getting mulched.

Without further ado, you went through the process. He slipped off one of his gloves as well and you empowered him, feeling the warmth of your boost leech from your own skin into his, and watching it spread like a full-body shiver across him. Without his face exposed, you imaged the glare of two blank masks into each other might have appeared imposing from the outside, but Clockblocker erased any risk of that quickly.

'Oh wow, that's pretty cool.'

'May I ask what has changed?'

The doctor interrupted, clearly ready to take notes. You weren't sure how long she'd been waiting in the room with Clockblocker before you had turned up, or whether she had been the one to acquire a patient's gown for him – or indeed, if he had brought his own – but you felt as though whatever reservoir of patience she had for the day had been worn thin already.

Clockblocker, to his credit, appeared more than used to giving a brief and he outlined the changes to his power with a degree of efficiency that was impressive and thorough.

'Still requires touch. Doesn't have to be hands, still, so that's still there. Frankly, I can still do exactly the same thing as before, in terms of freezing time, but I know how long it lasts, now. Five minutes, every time. And it moves - touch you, have it jump to something you're touching as well, that kind of thing, pretty far. As long as it's within maybe ten feet, I would say. And probably more important, it's not just freezing.'

He leaned in, voice lowered dramatically.

'I can unfreeze. And freeze again. Rinse, repeat.'

You weren't quite sure what that meant.

Nor, it appeared, was the doctor.

'Can you give an example?'

'Sure,' Clockblocker said, picking up the gown he had tossed to the side, holding it loosely in the air. 'Observe.'

The thing froze still – and when he released it, it hung in the air. Frozen. So far, nothing unsurprising, though if Clockblocker was correct it would stay there for five minutes exactly, obeying a predictable schedule that alone would make his power slightly more useful in the field.

He then took a few steps away, and picked up the doctor's clipboard, resting on the desk.

'Excuse me, can you please use something else?'

'Relax, you'll get it back. Watch.'

At that, he flicked his wrist and sent the clipboard spinning rapidly about its centre, directly at the cloth. You braced for impact, determined not to be the one that flinched; though you hadn't spend much mission time with Clockblocker and therefore hadn't seen his power in action much, you knew enough to know that what he froze became essentially indestructible; you expected the clipboard to bounce off, careening across the room at random if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, it would break on impact.

It did neither.

Instead, the moment it touched the frozen gown, the gown dropped out of the air, as though the strings were cut from its marionette. It slumped, as though caught on something, and when it finally overcame the snags that gravity suspended it from, it crumpled on to the ground and collapsed in a pile of fabric. Left in the air, mid-rotation, was the clipboard.

Clockblocker had switched the freezing, from a distance and without contact. As far as you knew, that was something extremely knew.

And something dangerous. Instantaneously, you allowed your mind to flicker through possibilities – almost infinite, ways to freeze and unfreeze and pass freezing from one object to another.

There had to be some kind of catch or limitation, but you weren't sure what it would be. Automatic switching of anything he had touched for five minutes after he'd touched it, and if he was still holding it, it could hop from item to item.

When Clockblocker had claimed it to still be a striker power, you thought, he may have been underestimating things. There was more than a little of the shaker to such a power, and even – in your most abstract of thoughts – the potential for blaster powers; could Clockblocker touch something, charge it, launch it, and then have it freeze upon contact? Indestructible bullets?

You were the one to shudder. You filed such thoughts away alongside grenade launching Regent as particularly grim and devious harbingers of the apocalypse. Perhaps it was better if you allowed Clockblocker to figure out any such potential boost-usages for himself. At least, until such a time as it became important in the field.

The doctor scrambled to assemble various other small tests that Clockblocker could fulfil, a rush that you were very much used to by that point. With only a singular boost available for testing given the ones that were already dedicated the Dauntless and insurance, and no telling how long precisely the boost would last, the opportunity to gather vast quantities of data was scarce. Luckily, it seemed as though those who used the power retained the memory of what they could and couldn't do with it after the boost passed, but nevertheless there was always an urgency to the evaluation following an empowerment.

As usual, you left them to it. The time was ticking closer to ten o'clock, and you were nervous about your scheduled meeting with Armsmaster – even more so given that morning's discovery that Lung was practically guaranteed to be involved in mass destruction of something within the next few months. While you had become well accustomed to delivering bad news to the Protectorate Leader, and he did you the favour of separating his thoughts of you from his perhaps apocalyptic dislike of the revelations your thinker power brought through, it still didn't make you happy to have to do it again and again. You were half sure that the mere mention of the power caused the senior tinker to enter a minor depression.

You reached Armsmaster's office with a few minutes to go before you were expected, and he was waiting for you. Contrary to your expectations, his room was largely normal and you saw no sign of Dragon's presence in whatever form that might take.

'Hello, sir.'

'Hello Penumbra, how are you this morning?'

'Well enough, sir. Yourself?'

'A similar evaluation. Are you ready to move to the evaluation room?'

That explained the lack of set-up in the office. Armsmaster clearly had some other plan outlined.

'Of course. Before we go, may I ask how things went yesterday, with Kid Win? I'm curious as to what happened.'

'Well, the time was certainly productive, I can divulge that much. Any more will have to wait until projects are finished and approval given by those in charge, but suffice it to say that I think the session was a success. Perhaps something to be repeated in the future, regardless of if clearance is given in this particular case.'

You were happy to hear that, though undoubtedly somewhat irritated not to be given a straight answer. If anyone should be excluded from specific clearance issues, it should, you thought, be the person who was directly responsible for the empowerment happening; after all, if you had stayed for the length of the project, something which was not forbidden by the set-up, you would have seen it first hand anyway.

Reluctant to complain, however, at least unless things began dragging on long enough to threaten your exit from the Bay before information was released, you simply nodded.

'Yes sir. I'm ready to go to the evaluation room.'

You were too nervous to question things. Speaking to Armsmaster was easy – you were confident in yourself as a hero, even if not as a person, and he had proven that even if he was a slightly bristly individual he was more than happy to take you seriously as a professional. Dragon was similar, even if her demeanour was sweeter on the surface. You had no doubt that she had every ounce of professionalism that Armsmaster had, and took you seriously enough to allow you to take part in a Birdcage escort. That alone spoke volumes given how dangerous a handful of them had been in the past, even if they had become more peaceful in more recent years.

None of that meant anything with regards to how they would view you as a tinker. They were arguably the world's two greatest tinkers, and arguably two of the greatest tinkers of all time. If String Theory, Sphere, and Hero didn't exist, it would probably be a unanimous attribution; and Sphere's contributions to the world had been heavily soured since his turn towards villainy. String Theory, bound as she was in the Birdcage, was hamstrung. Hero was dead. Dragon and Armsmaster stood alone, at least on the side of heroism.

And you were having trouble with your first device.

Though you were sure that the pair were tactful enough not to mock you for it, you couldn't shake the idea that you were wasting their time. Maybe you should have called things off – told Armsmaster that you would reschedule for another day.

But with Atlanta on the horizon, the most that would buy you was until the weekend. Armsmaster had been clear that he wanted you working under his supervision before he would permit anything major to go forward, and even though he trusted you, he was sceptical enough of nanotechnology that you believed he would pass on any reservations to the Atlanta Protectorate too; he'd have you stuck to twiddling your thumbs until you could make a trip back to Brockton Bay the moment you left the city.

So you didn't argue. You simply followed the man in the blue armour as he took a left at the end of the corridor and then led you down further into a quieter area of the building, before opening a nondescript door and proceeding inside.

When you stepped through after him, you were instantly fully aware of why he had set up a different room.

Primarily, size. It was about three times the size of his office, and about a third again the size of Kid Win's workshop. In the middle – in an echo of the previous day's multi-tinkering experiment – was a large table covered in an assortment of tools and materials, though none so specialised and specific as those you had seen at the hands of Armsmaster and Kid Win.

Their table had been filled with things they had been working on, tools they had constructed in the pursuit of their projects. Your table was filled with generic tools and materials – a sign that you were simply not on their level yet, as an inventor or a tinker. Nothing about it spoke as a slight, and you knew for a fact that it was simple pragmatism that made things happen that way, but it still stung as a reminder of how feeble you were in the field.

Behind the table stood a large computer monitor, before which Armsmaster took up position and pressed a few buttons, allowing a voice you recognised to filter into the room.

'Hello Penumbra, I hope you're having a pleasant morning.'

Dragon was already there.

'I am, thank you. You too.'

Why speaking to her felt so different in a different context was difficult to put your finger on, and when you finally felt it beneath your grasp it stung; you knew you weren't good enough to be there.

You shoved it away. Most of those emotions had been buried since you left Winslow, and you weren't going to allow them to crop up again in front of people you held some trust in. You'd been over it time and again in your head, and while you couldn't choose to stop feeling doubt in yourself, you could choose to fight through it anyway. Willpower, at least, you had in spades.

'Before we begin,' Armsmaster said, 'I was hoping you could provide a brief summary of your initial experiences as a tinker. Designs you may have made, your thoughts and impulses since gaining the power, and the processes you have been through to actualise your designs.'

'Take your time,' Dragon followed. 'We have well into the afternoon.'

If she had expected enough to fill multiple hours, she was going to be sorely disappointed.

Taking a matter of five minutes, you summed it up: you had gone into something resembling what you believed to be a fugue and made some designs. A number of them, of varying qualities and in various depths, and you had presented them to Armsmaster without registering what that might have indicated. He told you that you may have been a tinker and you worked alongside Kid Win in attempting to make one of your designs a reality, but hit a snag, before reporting to Armsmaster again and brute-force realising your specialty. That let you to this situation, and you were still without your first finished creation as a result of that ambiguity and Armsmaster's distrust of your specialty.

Only your mention of a desire to integrate the technology into yourself in some way seemed to draw an element of surprise.

'There is good news and bad news,' Dragon began. 'The good news is that if you are receiving a formed plan to do something with your specialty, it should be theoretically possible. So the likelihood that you can eventually achieve what you want is high. The downside is that, particularly with your focus on nanotechnology, you are going to have to take small steps – pardon the pun. Risks of failure are high, and road-blocks will present important moments to consider so that you don't make potentially dangerous mistakes.'

'Why is it that nanotechnology is so dangerous? Armsmaster said something about the asylum before. Did something happen?'

Neither of them responded instantly.

'There have been,' Dragon paused briefly, 'sixteen parahumans known to have triggered in the continental United States with powers which could be called nanotechnology in some form or another. All of them since two-thousand. Almost all of them, with two small exceptions, have been confined to the Parahuman Asylum or equivalent facilities in that time. Though nobody knows why, perhaps a function of the esoteric possibilities nanotechnology seems to present, those with such specialities tend towards. . . self destructive experimentation, often associated with the brain.'

You felt the blood drain out of your head.

'And those exceptions?'

'The first, a tinker by the name of Ariadne, designed a form of nano-weave cabling that can extend its own length through binding together matter on an atomic scale. It functions at an impressive strength, though the material used to construct it does make it somewhat variable. The other, well, he is in the room with you.'

'Flattery,' Armsmaster said, and you almost thought for a moment that you saw a brief smile flicker across his face before it re-set, 'but Dragon is referring to an ongoing project of my own involving mono-atomic division. There has yet to be a successful prototype larger than a scalpel blade, but I have hopes. If you can even call that legitimate nanotechnology, it is the only thing I have created to this date that you could place in that category.'

While you weren't entirely sure what he was talking about, you were nonetheless impressed. If nanotechnology was significant enough for it to be its own specialty, for him to be able to stretch into it without actually being a nanotech tinker in his own right signified something that you thought impossible for anyone other than Dragon. Respect welled up in you for him, and you wondered if he knew how fantastic he was at his job. For a moment, you were glad he had Dragon to champion him, as you suspected he would never have admitted his advancements himself.

'Nevertheless,' Dragon continued. 'Historical problems have arisen quickly, with tinkers trying to modify themselves within days of triggering. That doesn't seem to be a problem for you, and as long as you work to continue getting approval from experienced tinkers before undergoing significant projects, you should be fine. You're a sensible girl, Penumbra. I trust that you wouldn't do anything foolish. Given your continued evolution of new powers without suffering an unchained trigger or similar, you seem far more stable than any previous nano-tinkers have been.'

Without a full understanding of what an unchained trigger was, you weren't sure whether to take it as a compliment, and so you smiled weakly. The display of trust was something you hadn't quite expected, but you were willing to take it. Even if it hadn't quite sunk in yet, and wouldn't for several hours. Dragon, though she didn't see it through your helmet, seemed to get the idea well enough, and she moved on.

'Can you explain your current project?'

'Oh, yeah, of course. I disassembled a phone and I extracted a lot of the pieces and attached them to a frame so I could network them together and allow them to gather and transmit information without all of the extra stuff attached to them, with the idea that if I could get it integrated into my helmet then I would be able to communicate with others and communicate back without having to use a phone. The goal was to make it a mental communication so that it could be done silently, but I can't think of a way to do that right now without trying to hook it into my brain. Which sounds like a bad idea, especially given your explanation.'

'Perhaps not a bad idea in general,' Armsmaster said, 'but a bad idea for now. You have done no research into the body and medical procedures, correct?'

You confirmed.

'And you have no specialist tools that might allow you to build complete, shielded, housed circuits for nanoscopic devices. Also correct?'

You confirmed again, feeling dread begin to settle in.

'Then it seems you have a new project, at least for the time being. Rather than pursuing your current project further than it is already, you should take one of those routes and decide how you're going to facilitate that move, and then other moves in the future. Eventually you will do both if you are determined to integrate technology into yourself – not a flawed idea inherently, cybernetics are a plausible pursuit that other tinkers have undergone, to some extent – but the beginning stages of a tinker's career must be procedural. I told Kid Win as much, and six weeks later he had a first prototype of his hover board.'

Some of the dread washed away under the explanation, and you felt a breath of air through the filtration of your mask. It was normal to need tools. That made sense. Kid Win had needed them too at one point, and once he had that settled the returns had come quickly. You tried to ignore how long he had then been waylaid by other uncertainties; after all, he hadn't known his specialty yet, and you did. Even if that specialty was one which appeared to be, on some level, cursed.

With that clarified, you turned your attention to the bench. There was a plethora of materials to work with, but instantly you recognised the flaws in so many of the tools available. With Kid Win's throwaways, you had been able to suppress the displeasure that you had felt, filled instead with the eagerness of getting to work. Something being close enough that it would do overrode the need for perfection.

Looking instead at standard Dremel tools, hand drills, polishing wheels, soldering guns, and wire clamps, you felt a wave of revulsion pulse through you. You knew you could do better.

And so you did. Falling upon the resources with the fervour of the starving, you began reducing the piles of material in front of you to piles of components, which were then sorted into salvageable and discarded segments. You moved through simple circuits with ease, sorting them more by aura and instinct than by any real knowledge of the things you were working with. You saw Armsmaster partitioning off a number of the things you discarded, clearly aware of what they were or some manner in which he could use them – perhaps after an education, you would know better than to discard them, but to your tinker's instinct they meant nothing.

Dragon occasionally spoke through the computer, her voice tinged electronic in the same way that Armsmaster's own auto-pilot vocalisations were, and she guided you from component to component like a wise mentor as you exhausted supplies in one location and swanned over to the next. Armsmaster himself provided commentary and informed you what you were working with at each stage; transistors, resistors, capacitors, all far too large but at least correct in theory, and you felt yourself becoming frustrated. Everything was large. To build smaller, you had to be small, and finding the things you could adapt to a correct scale was difficult.

But difficult did not mean impossible. Over the course of nearly an hour, you reduced what must have been two hundred pounds of circuitry to less than a tenth of its original weight, leaving you with only a small set of tools. Even those, you knew you would need to modify further; the tweezers you had salvaged as the set spring from inside a clamp would need filing down, and even then they would serve only as a tool with which to build a smaller set of tweezers, capable of gripping on an even more minute scale.

The longer you worked, the most steadily the ideas began to flow, and you were undisturbed. Armsmaster and Dragon drew quiet after some time and left you to your own devices, while constantly ensuring that you were both present and seemingly responsive by speaking aloud at times to draw your gaze. They seemed satisfied – or at least understanding – of your consumption in your job.

Nearly two hours after you had begun, the momentum began to run out. You felt the mild pressure in your lower back from bending over at the waist to inspect the table of goods, though it fled relatively quickly as you straightened your posture and felt your bones click.

You had what you needed for now. There were materials you would need to go further, to hone your tools more carefully, and to get to the point where you were truly happy. Already, ideas were flooding in to your head for methods by which you could make even your existing headpiece smaller; with maybe one or two more opportunities to work, you would have it finished – you knew that much.

For now, though, you inspected your workspace.

It was a hellscape.

Every bit of a mess as Kid Win's workshop was, you had left the room. Armsmaster's attempts to clear things away had ceased, and Dragon's physical absence had made her a captive witness to what could only have been described as an act of technological terror.

That they didn't force you to clean was your only saving grace.

Looking at the clock, you could see it was the early afternoon. Multiple hours had been stolen away and you didn't even understand everything you had done. Thus was the nature of the tinker, you supposed – for all the pretences to science it was, in terms of function, more like just doing things and knowing they would work because of the power itself. In many ways, each moment spent tinkering was just an insult to the act of actual engineering. You couldn't bring yourself to feel entirely bad about that; it meant, at least, that only Dragon would ever know how stupid the things you did were, and she was at least polite enough not to mock you for it.

You left that afternoon with a pouch filled with tools and a promise to present your prototype to Armsmaster once it was completed. And a further promise not to perform brain surgery on yourself or anyone else until Dragon had cleared it. Apparently, for reasons you could not detect despite the jovial tone, she did not trust Armsmaster to be the judge in those particular matters.

The air outside felt cold even through your helmet, and you flew home distracted by ambient thoughts of machines and metal under your fingers.

Once you got there, your mind was taken from you again – this time, but the furious barking of the neighbour's dog. Large and mean, it was generally kept inside, but as you landed in your back yard it barked with a ferocity that was ignorant to the real danger it could have been in. Froth foamed around its jaws, and you saw it straining at the long chain that kept attached to the concrete post outside its kennel.

'Down boy. Shut up.'

You muttered, not bothering to try and calm it in any conventional sense.

And then it felt silent, and dropped to a seated position.

You widened your eyes in shock. The thing had never responded to you before – and somewhere in the back of your mind, you wondered what Rachel would think of you calling him a thing. Probably nothing nice, and you resolved to learn its name if you could.

Tentatively, you looked out at it.

'Go back in your kennel.'

For a moment, it froze, before shuddering like a stalled car. You were tense yourself, ready to jump if it resumed its barking. Silence reigned, however, and after but a moment of hesitation, it turned and went back inside the kennel, laying down on the floor with a quiet clinking of the chain.

Interesting. Or at least, that was one way to put it.

Actions Remaining:

- Finish writing and give a farewell speech before leaving Brockton Bay

- Complete advanced ConFoam class with Regent and Rachel (Saturday 16th)

- Try out the following hobbies: reading, cooking, woodworking, swimming, puzzles

- Look up a guide to sign language online

- Look into speech making techniques and structure

- Ask Vicky's opinion on music and for some artists she likes

Large chapter that fought and clawed with me all the way. Nevertheless, we drew ourselves as a mermaid, empowered Clockblocker, tinkered under the supervision of Armsmaster and Dragon, began getting Tinker tools developed on their advice, found out why nanotech tinkers seem to go mental, and decided that reading might be a hobby to pursue. That's brilliant! We also find out that Taylor's Mom was really into Gothic literature. Why? Because I'm doing my PhD in Gothic Literature right now, so you're seeing the expression of my own life there.