gh

In the end, though… It's nice. It's time for you to spend with your dad. The rest of his family too, but the longer you sit there, disconnected from everyone, letting their discussions wash past you…

You realize that this isn't really your place anymore. You'd rejected this, fundamentally. If you wanted to stay connected to people, to society, you wouldn't have quit your job. You wouldn't have decided to throw everything away in the name of ambition.

The longer you sit there, the more you realize that this isn't your place.

This isn't just not your home. It's not your people. It feels like it's barely even your species.

Everything they're talking about. Everything they're doing. It's all just too… human. Too small.

You came here from a levitating factory the size of an aircraft carrier that runs on a power source based off lying to reality. To sit at a fancy dinner.

WASTE OF TIME, your power burns. It's true. It's fair. It's even right.

It's a good reminder of where you'd come from… But it's too little. Too small.

It's another thing you need to discard. Another thing you need to discard.

But still, first… After the dinner is over, you make your way to your father. He smiles guilelessly at you, clearly in a good mood. But he's not talking, so he's probably not even here right now.

"Hey, dad. I'll be heading out. I love you."

He doesn't respond. But he's still smiling. That's fine.

This time, you adjust your watch on your way out the door. You press the right buttons, the right beacons. It ticks once, the Daemon registering that it received your message.

A few blocks away, the Phase Carrier crackles into existence, the Daemon perched on the dash.

"Alright." You say. "Let's go home."

Your phone chirps loudly, and the Daemon speaks.

"Endbringer sighted." The Daemon says, and your heart skips a beat. "Simurgh has touched down in Paris."

You let go of a breath. You'd thought it was coming here. You're almost a week away, and… it would have been bad. But whatever Ziz is doing, it doesn't think the problem is here. At least not yet.

If you had weapons. Or defenses. If you had something- anything- that would come in handy for an Endbringer, you would fight.

But you don't. Not yet.

You sigh, and get back to work.

"Shit's going to get real, tomorrow." You say.

"Is it really?" Jacey asked. You'd considered asking her to go with you to your thanksgiving party a few weeks back, but then realized that it would only be a good idea if you wanted to ruin it. She would've probably burned the building down.

"Yeah," you say. "... I'm going to be moving out of this lab, too."

Jacey pauses. She sits up from the couch, and eyes your Phase Carrier. It's full of the last few bits of your tech and tools you've had in the lab. Even the Ichor Wellspring's been deactivated, temporarily, sitting in the back.

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah. Since I've launched my craft up there, I've been working overtime to finish it. And now that it's done… May as well pick and move up everything else."

"Nice," Jacey says. "More lab space for me."

"Y.. yeah," You respond.

She gives you a small, wistful smile- a variant on her wide grin- and waves.

"Alright, then." She says. "It's been good."

"Yeah." You respond. "You take care. I don't want to have to break you out of jail a second time."

"Lies. You'd totally do it again, just so you can tie me to a chair again," She drawls and winks. "That said. You know my number. I'll stick around in town a bit longer, at least until things get boring. So if you ever want to fuck shit up… just ask."

"I will," You smile.

"Oh! And don't forget you owe me!" She calls, as you climb into your phase carrier. You give her the middle finger, and she cackles, giving it back to you.

Then you phase out of the theater. You don't know if you'll ever be back.

The transposition array isn't just a single teleporter. It's a field emitter, a phase wave. Your nanites should be able to to pick up on that field, generate their own transposition coordinates, and lock themselves into other exact locations on the same wavelength. It's also, in a certain point of view, a pocket dimension. Spatially speaking, everything within the field should correspond to a single point within the pocket dimension. The transition should be able to build up in the nanites like a static charge, allow them to slip in and out on demand.

It's complex, to say the least. The hardest part was figuring out what to use as a carrier for the phase wave, a medium for the subspace emissions. At first, you thought you could use some kind of magnetic or radio field, but there were destabilization issues. Drift where you definitely didn't want it.

Finally, you decided on light. It's fast, it's easy to generate. It might leave shadows or diffuse, but with the right feedback markers it's just an advanced scanning method. You even borrowed some of the basic data from Shadow Stalker's scans, allowing you to extend the emitter even further, into nearby subdimensions, to make sure that even through fog or dense materials you can still extend the field into the entire range. And since it's based on light, you've needed to mess a lot with mirrors. Prisms, gas chambers. An entire complex assortment of modulators and refractors.

It's a cylinder, in the end. A tangle of wires and tubes and pipes, the most tightly compacted design you've ever had to work on. Originally, each component was separate, spread out over your workshop. But the Daemon is brilliant- with its help, you were able to adjust and fit the components together elegantly, tightly combining them into a perfect cylinder. The world's largest laser, nearly the size of a small car.

The array is slowly swinging, hanging from its winches in the pavilion of the Hyperforge. Sliding along the ceiling on their rails are pulleys and winches, carrying most of the array's weight as you push it toward the center of the pavilion. When you get close, you subvocalize to the Daemon. It extends the nozzles of the nanite pumps, and the hoses reach out to grab the array by its handles. Slowly, carefully, you disconnect each of the winches. You look down the shaft, at the sea below… and then finally give one last push on the array. It slides down the shaft, settling at the bottom, and the hoses begin to connect everything, attaching it to the rest of the Hyperforge's machinery.

You make sure it's all in place, lock in the last few bolts, and weld together the last of the container.

And then… it's done.

The Hyperforge isn't complete. But all the pieces are in place. It's fully operational.

It's finally time. It's late, late at night. Closer to the morning than night, in fact.

You make your way back up to the crown, to the control room, and set yourself into the seat. You key the mic.

"Be alerted, Protectorate HQ. This is Icarus," You say. "My tinkertech structure is complete. I'll begin activation in approximately two minutes."

Then, you set the hyperforge to lift. Slowly, it begins to rise. Further and further into the sky.

There's a long delay. Almost a minute and a half later, someone contacts you over the radio.

"Uh, Icarus, this is Deputy Director Renick. Can you please tell us what's going on?"

"Like I said," You drawl. "Salvaging."

Then you hit the button. The Daemon looks down, analyzing the entire boat graveyard. Displays pop up in your visor, and the Hyperforge begins to rumble.

A hole opens in the bottom of the hyperforge, and a beam of scintillating, unearthly light shines down.

And where it shines, nanites warp into existence, slipping between individual molecules. In moments, the nanites begin grabbing objects, mining away at everything it claims. Perfect records are stored in the computation node, holding a scan of everything you're consuming.

Resources are flooding your hyperforge, the levitation core winding up faster and faster to deal with the weight. Steel, heavy metals, rust, everything you're scanning with the light- except the saltwater of the sea- is being absorbed, packed away. Crunched into hyperdense cubes and canisters in the pavilion. More and more weight is being layered on. Tendrils reach out through the hyperforge's mechanisms, hovering over the incomplete portions of the hyperforge's structure. The mist sprays nanites over the area, and it prints itself into existence.

In less than an hour, it's done.

The Boat Graveyard is clear. Even at the bottom of the bay, where rust and panels have been buried under decades of silt, you've recovered everything you can. Lost objects, old rusted watches, ancient rings and whatever treasures have been hidden below… It's all on the Hyperforge.

All of it is on the hyperforge. The inventory screen is showing you all of your resources. You have a near endless amount of iron, and with the CO2 in the air, you can just outright make steel from it.

"Icarus, please respond." Someone is saying on the radio. It's Armsmaster. "That… Was that a weapon? That kind of energy discharge is exceedingly dangerous-"

"That was a teleportation beam." You drawl. "I didn't call this the Daedalean Hyperforge for nothing."

"... Forge?" he asks. "... Is that a mass production device?"

"I almost named it after the sun." You respond. A laugh is bubbling up in your throat. "Because I'm flying."

Worth it. It's totally worth it.

You press a few buttons, and the Daemon quickly puts together a simple paint. Basic silicates and iron, in just the right structure to absorb blue light. A moment later, The golden hyperforge shines in the light of the rising sun.

Now. Now's your golden age. You've been itching to design some new devices, and now that you have the freedom to actually make stuff, you will.Thinker protection.

You sit there, pushing at the idea.

Thinker protection. Thinker protection.

Nothing immediately comes to mind, at first, so you probably need more detail than that. You need to sort it into categories, figure out which you can do something about and which you won't.

The thinkers that boost themselves somehow, you don't really care about. The likes of Uber or whoever can keep their powers around you. They're probably the lowest priority, next to the ones who can… smell colors or see temperatures or whatever.

The ones that can read everything about you by the way your pinkie twitches…. They're annoying, but you know for a fact that they don't shut up unless somebody makes them. They have an urge to brag about what they've found out.

No, your biggest worry- your biggest concern- is for the capes that can watch you and make decisions when you're not even there. Precogs, Coil-types, Clairvoyants.

That seems… much easier. The concept for a field generator pops into your head. Something small, a little compartment you could hide on your suit. Cross it over with a Noise generator, one that's perpetually capable of activating upon temporal instability but never actually does. It'll need to be able to reach into the future to even detect that, you're pretty sure, beyond just an uncertainty field. And if you ever need a bunch of blinding, randomized camouflage, you'll be able to hard-activate it instead of in potential futures.

It might not work perfectly, and it might not work all the time, but you'll be able to tweak the sensitivity, and at least if someone fucks with time, the machine will let you tell.

"Thank you for meeting with us," Armsmaster says. You shake his hand. Next to him, sitting on the corner of the desk, is an opened laptop with Dragon's display on the screen. Sitting in one of the corners is a tinkertech analyst, a balding man in a labcoat and an ID clipped to his lapel. Behind the desk is Deputy Director Renick. A quiet man, with the kind of weariness that sort of showed he was the administrative power behind the throne.

In this case, they probably figured Piggot was too important or volatile to meet with you.

"It's no problem. I figured there might be some concerns coming from the Protectorate considering my tinkertech, so I figured I'd come in, answer some questions you might have." You say, and set a three-ring binder on the desk. "I also brought some schematics."

"On paper?" Armsmaster asks, and it sounds like he's slightly disapproving.

"I've got electronic records, but I'm technically not Protectorate-Affiliated. This way there won't be any security concerns on your part," You say. "You can keep records of these however you'd like when we're done here."

"Understood." Armsmaster says. "First and foremost, can you tell us precisely what it is you have floating above the bay?"

"Right. It's called the Daedalean Hyperforge." You say. "It's a mobile floating base, first and foremost. It's only afterwards that I installed a system to process and refine materials, as you've seen over the past few weeks. Then there's the transposition array. It's effectively a scanning beam that also serves as a carrier for a teleportation effect."

"What happens if an organic body gets caught in that beam?" The analyst asks.

"Nothing." You say. "That is, the system is based on analysis first, and processing afterward. I've put in a few safeguards against consuming or disintegrating anything within a few feet of macro-scale organic creatures."

"How reliable would you say it is?"

With the nanites and the scanning process… You'd pretty much have to actively turn off the safeguards for anything like that to happen. Some of them, you're pretty sure, were enforced by your power. "Extremely. One of my biggest priorities was to prevent this thing from being- even conceptually- a weapon."

"Can you elaborate on why that is?" Dragon asks.

"Restrictions due to my power and its… idiosyncrasies," You say. "I have to be very careful when determining how a device functions before it's even begun."

"I see." She says with a nod.

"Icarus, we're also concerned about any possible side-effects." The analyst speaks up again, "Tinkertech of this scale can fail massively, if or when it fails. So we'd like to talk about failure modes and side-effects."

"Sure thing," You start with. "While this is one large device, it's conceptually been split into four main components. The Power Source, Levitation Core, Processing, and then the Transposition Array. We can start with failure modes for each. I'll start with telling you the worst cases, and we'll work up from there." You say. "If that's fine with you?"

"That would be perfect, Mister Icarus." The Analyst says.

You pull open your book, and Armsmaster leans forward despite himself.

You lie about the generator, the Ichor Fluid, and while you don't exactly hide that the processing can play with molecular bonds, you avoid the dreaded 'nanite' word. But you can already tell. This meeting's going to take forever.

Right. Drones. Your mind keeps coming back to drones. You were kind of torn between designing drones or weapons first, but with the hyperforge done, it means you can create, scan, and duplicate things. Duplicated guns doesn't sound as useful as drones, to be honest, so the drone concept is one that you're feeling more inspired by. With the Hyperforge done, that means you're not just building one drone. Not one flying camera, but something that can be created, scanned, and duplicated.

Flying is a must. Simple atmospheric propulsion. These will be lightweight, so you won't need something as strong as that ionic propulsion system from before. You'll figure out specifics later, so you know how much weight you'll be playing around with.

Networking. If you're going to have more than one, they'll need to be able to communicate with one another. Good communication, too. Not just 'Here's where I am.' You're thinking a sort of modular, interlinking system, sharing data with one another and crunching their decision-making algorithm together. A hivemind. The more there are, the smarter they'll get. That just means they need slightly more computer parts than they'll need, and high bandwidth networking technology. You could always use radio, mundane computer parts with mundane radio tech, and use the Daemon to program the software… But it feels like there's something else you could do. You make a note to come back to the concept later.

One thing that's giving you pause is what would the drones… do, exactly? The idea of a networked hivemind of multiple robotic minions is an interesting one, but they need a purpose. A goal. You could give them weapons, but then they'd be used only for fighting. Giving them armor so they can defend things would be useful, but the armor itself would be heavy, and the drones would likely take damage anyway. Maybe a modular tool, some kind of smart alloy that could change shape on command. Give them more universal ab-

You freeze.

"Daemon. Open Glory Girl's scan data," You say. The screens flash, and then you're looking at her scan data. The way the forcefield is contoured to her body, the psionic emotional broadcast. Her inertialess flight mechanisms.

… There's even a slight suggestion that her forcefield could move independent of her body. And with that thought, that realization, you come to a conclusion. Glory Girl's data might be ideal for this.

One larger, bulky drone. Has the computer software, basic flight systems, sensors and cameras… but then a psionic broadcast system. You can tweak it to a wavelength that won't decay into emotional pollution. They'll communicate through the same method Glory Girl's aura works on.

Beyond that, a forcefield generator- no, not generator. Projector. Each main drone will project forcefield-based sub-drones, empowered by the same psionic broadcast. The way the fields adapt to incoming energy, you can power them purely off the same psionic broadcast. Even control them. Maybe even use one drone to power another, with the right energy recovery system. The subdrones can be programmed into different shapes on command. Weaponized spike-shaped drones, tool using drones, ambulatory 'pick innocent civilian up' drones… If you leave it flexible enough, the options are endless.

It's perfect.

"There are two messages of importance you have received," The Daemon says about the time you pull yourself out of your tinker fugue.

"Shit, the Elite, I forgot about that," You respond.

"Dark Society has also contacted you."

"Dark Society?" You ask. The Daemon clicks for a few moments.

"Dark Society is a highly funded collection of villains and villain teams that originated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are notable for their decentralized organization system, and extremely high funding from unknown sources. They have currently expanded into some of the largest cities on the east coast, including New York, Washington DC, Charlotte, and most recently Boston. It is suspected they have some reliable method of interacting or modifying parahuman powers, as several of their members have expanded their powers."

"Right. What's their email saying?"

"The cape Basilisk is extremely impressed by your appearance in Brockton Bay, and is willing to meet with you. He would like to discuss possible funding for future tinkertech endeavors in exchange for either membership or 'your other, more subtle power'." The Daemon says.

"What does that mean?"

"He is likely implying that he has more interest in your knowledge and analysis abilities than your tinkering abilities."

"Who's Basilisk?"

"Long-standing member of Dark Society, and he is generally the main mode of contact with the Dark Society. His power is unknown or kept extremely secret, as there's no recorded uses of it. The PRT suspects him as either a Thinker, Stranger, or both."

"Joy." You drawl. "Summarize the message from the Elite for me, too."

"The Elite would like to meet with you at a location of your choosing. They are offering membership. They have listed several benefits of joining, such as funding, legal aid, cape backup, a market for tinkertech."

"Did they say who I'd be meeting with?"

"No." The Daemon responds.

You sigh, looking at the two emails.

Spoiler: Designs Gained

Affinity: -2, (27)

Resources: 13

[] You'll meet with the Dark Society guy. You've never heard of them before, weirdly enough.

[] You'll meet with the Elite. At least see what you can negotiate from them.

[] You'll meet with both groups. See what they both want, and then make a decision.

[] Screw them both. You have building to do. (Build Phase)

-[] [Build] Construct the Shining Drone. (-2 Resources)