7.9

7.9

You shook off the shiver that came over you from Vicky's message. The Birdcage still haunted your imagination as a place of true horror; somewhere that the worst went and festered among their own, growing only worse over time. No escape, no moderation. Assault's concerns still rang loudly in your head; even if someone wasn't that bad going in, they would need to become abominable purely to survive. It manufactured malice, as a core function. That it was seemingly inescapable was the only thing that stopped it keeping you up at night, and even then you knew that it was managed by Dragon, who didn't really seem to want to be managing it in the first place.

Instead of letting your thoughts dwell on whatever ravings might come out of a place like that, you focused instead on your tinkering. You had been working on construction bots for a little while, and with your scanners completed you were able to focus all of your attention on them; consequently, they were reaching a stage where you thought that they were potentially going to start paying off in some way.

Of course, you didn't have nearly enough experience with automation or with independent bots to have them doing anything particularly delicate, but you had the ideas rushing through your head when you put them together, a mad flow of tinkering inspiration that had prompted the initial plans, and that same intuition was happy to fill in the blanks – eager, even, with a kind of zeal that was generally reserved for the religious – in order to bring them to life.

They were small, but in comparison to your scanners and your communication's modules, they were still too large. Something to be honed with subsequent iterations. You had three of them; each of them around two inches in diameter, orbs which could be mounted on tripods or simply hold themselves in place, and which could perform basic tasks given to them via a modified version of your headset's voice command system. They could sprout arms and weld, solder, manoeuvre, and generally help perform tasks without demanding you literally stand over them like an inspector.

As you made some of the finishing touches, you allowed your mind to wander; one of the strange things about tinkering was that, as long as you accepted the fact that your engineering was coming largely from a position of parahuman madness rather than a concerted effort of science, you could almost partition your mind and allow it to wander while your hands went on autopilot.

It wasn't a fully reliable system, and you wouldn't allow yourself to think of anything completely disconnected during the more delicate stages of invention or construction, but when you were just putting finishing touches on the third of a set of construction bots, you weren't even sure how much brain power was demanded.

Instead, you were thinking about your anti-mastering ideas for sound. It seemed simple enough; using the same megaphone innards you were going to install into your helmet – thankfully minimised, to avoid the growing concern of there simply not being enough space in the walls of the headgear – you could also have a microphone – perhaps two, in different locations – constantly capturing sound. Essentially, you would be always registering a stereo recording of your surroundings, and if you knew a particularly frequency you could just work out the difference in sound between the two recordings (of course, a sound source would always have to be closer, even if only slightly, to one of the microphones) and then subtract one from the other before applying some gain to the remaining soundtrack, bringing it back up to an audible volume.

The result would be, you were certain, completely ugly. Muffled, with poor fidelity, but still, it should work to remove signals.

The only issue was that you had to actually know what the recording was working on in order to eliminate sound sources you wanted eliminated instead of just blanketing everything within a given frequency range; essentially, it would take a moment with each new voice it had to track. That was a potential weakness.

But a potential weakness that existed for a moment before eliminating a threat was better than a gaping weakness with no real way of improvement, which is what you had already. So the process was undertaken, and one of the construction bots was set to work.

You wondered how many of the masters in Atlanta even used voice based vectors. You'd thought about the same issue already, and had been left pondering about The Count, whose mechanisms were largely unknown. How was that even possible for someone who had been in such a prominent position for so long?

Either he had some way of commanding ultimate loyalty, so that nobody would ever tell, or the mechanism was simply obscure enough that nobody was able to work it out with any confidence.

Chances that the Count has a sound based mastering power?

0%

Completely unsurprising; sound seemed like the easiest mechanism to identify. If a master could be defeated by wearing ear-muffs, they would probably have some difficulty rising to the prominence that The Count had. Or, if they managed it, they probably wouldn't manage to stay there for too long before someone figured them out and took advantage of the obvious weakness.

Parahuman for less than six months, you were already working out ways to try and minimise the threat. If you could do it, anyone could, even if they might not take such a technological method; it was easy to imagine someone like Fog simply overcoming the problem by transforming into a cloud of corrosive toxic smoke, without any hearing at all, and destroying The Count in a single moment.

No, it couldn't be that.

Chances that The Count's power works through an area of effect, like Scrivener's?

80%

Not very intuitive; surely it either affected an area or it didn't? There had to be some other variable, or maybe there was more than one method available to him, but in either case you were sure that letting the PRT know couldn't hurt. Whether they suspected anything or not – and you thought that they probably did – having some kind of assurance that area of effect was at least probably on the table meant something. Beyond that, you weren't sure.

Having the files already open made it easy to add a suggested edit, along with a user's note identifying who had made the change. You weren't sure when the PRT had started digitising their files but whoever had thought to put in a service log, where changes that were made all had their maker attached for verification, was helpful.

Part of you wondered why, if such a service was available, there was so much insistence on paper. Of course, there was something slightly more reliable about paper. If you printed something out, that same text would be there – barring some strange physical manipulation that would almost certainly leave marks – months or years later, unchanged. Put something on a digital platform and even the most rudimentary of hacking process could render it vulnerable. Text was, after all, only text, and if it had to be accessible to people to read in the first place that left it vulnerable to some kind of modification.

No, keeping the most important basics on paper made a lot of sense, even if it was less convenient.

Moving your helmet around with a few dull clunks, you considered what other options you had for engaging with enemies. Having a helmet that could figure out and filter a master with at least some success was fine, but thus far your approach to villainous parahumans was just to punch them or wrap them in your serpent's tail and figure things out later.

To your credit, it had worked, but after having failed in combat once it may have been practical to work out some general priorities.

So, as you tinkered, you ran through some ideas. Mastering is the hardest thing to avoid, potentially, but you were already working on that as part of your megaphone/microphone apparatus, and you were doing what you could do to counter it. Thinkers seemed the next up but you had no real idea about how to deal with those. You knew that Armsmaster and Dauntless both had developed something that they felt gave them some degree of resistance, and clearly it worked at least a little because they had been able to get the drop on Coil well enough alongside you, but Dauntless' system of empowering his items didn't work for anyone but the man himself and you were a while away from being able to imitate whatever it was Armsmaster was doing.

Asking him seemed like a decent idea, but without any confidence that you'd be able to imitate it, thinker resistance went on the back-burner. Brutes seemed to be simple enough; you didn't know a brute in the world you couldn't match in pure muscle, and that was a problem that solved itself. Strikers were much harder, given the kind of strange, esoteric powers they could sometimes bring to the battlefield, but Shadow Snare followed by con-foam seemed like a good enough plan for them in most instances; definitely at least something to try. Blasters, too, could be potentially countered by your own blasts and then Staticked to try and obscure their aim before being Pixie Dust; honestly, a lot of the plans you were considering ended with a dosage of Pixie Dust.

When you have a very large hammer, sometimes most things just did become nails.

Strangers seemed to be the only exception. Whether or not you could pin someone down with the pink mist if you didn't even know they were there, or that they were a parahuman, or that they were a threat, was something you had to guess on. Probably safest to assume that you couldn't and go from there, but you struggled to think of a way that you could bypass them. Maybe Percentile would work, but even in those cases you would have to think to ask it about the presence of a stranger, and you had no guarantee that a given villain wouldn't just compel you not to do such a thing.

Working around strangers was a difficult prospect, and you didn't like it one bit.

Using Overcharge seemed a lot more situational. It didn't really factor in to any given plan of action, but you thought it might have been a good idea to start using it more than you had in the past. Thus far, you'd used it a few times in the field, but not really as part of a plan. It was just something that came up in the moment and generally seemed to pay off by altering the conditions of the battle before the other combatant could even know that they had been altered. Strategically, that element of surprise held a lot of value, but it wasn't exactly something that you were doing as a master tactician.

Offering up the power to others in the Protectorate seemed like a good idea, at least the bigger names. Knowing what options were on the table whenever a major crisis came up couldn't be a bad thing.

You didn't even feel the need to confirm to yourself that you were talking about the Endbringers. It had been months since Canberra, and you would be stupid not to be thinking about the next time one could come along. Finding out what you could do for the Triumvirate, at least, the ones who attended near enough every single Endbringer battle sounded like common sense. You'd mention it to Cinereal. The older parahuman didn't attend Endbringer battles herself, her power being both poorly set up for combating the particular threats the monsters presented and also, at least until you overcharged her, her breaker state rooted her to a single spot in what generally turned into a moving battle. But that didn't mean she didn't want the Endbringers dealt with as much as anyone else.

As you slotted the speaker grill into the section of ventilation at the base of the helmet, just below your jawline and just behind the massive filters that prevented the ingress of water or other contaminants, you wondered if maybe you could tinker something up that could help against the Endbringers. Percentile had told you in the past that you could do something to help, so maybe the additional power would give additional avenues for that.

You asked the question and were promptly denied; it was unlikely. Less than twenty per cent.

Would overcharging the Triumvirate even help? You knew that they were capable of driving Endbringers back without your help, so it seemed logical, but you wanted confirmation. With questions remaining, you decided to use some of them up.

Chances that overcharging Legend could allow him to push an Endbringer back?

26%

Not likely. You hadn't expected it; while Legend was incredibly powerful and an excellent leader – thought of by most as the pinnacle of a hero in the symbolic sense, even if he was widely considered the least powerful of the Triumvirate – he was rarely the deciding factor in an Endbringer fight.

Chances that overcharging Alexandria could allow her to push an Endbringer back?

41%

More along the lines of what you expected. In a lot of ways, overcharging Alexandria was the closest thing you could get to overcharging yourself, given her strength and resilience, plus her flight and agility in the air. Still, her against an Endbringer was generally just a battle of brute force, and you weren't sure if anything could really best a beast like that in that kind of fight. Especially when they had additional weapons and the Triumvirate's leader didn't.

That left the obvious one. You barely even felt the need to ask. The answer seemed beneath questioning. Still, for the sake of completion, you went for it. Your headache was in its infancy but one more question couldn't hurt.

Chances that overcharging Eidolon could allow him to push an Endbringer back?

Inconclusive

Now that was a surprise. You racked your brains and tried to think about whether you had ever targeted a question at Eidolon before. It was possible – in fact, it seemed likely that you would have done at some point – but you couldn't remember for sure.

Trying to justify the result of the question, you ran through options rapidly. Maybe it was because his powers changed so often, you couldn't really know what options you would be overcharging? Maybe he had a power up at that precise moment that prevented thinkers from looking in on him. Maybe, and this thought was both the most intriguing and most intimidating, he was simply too powerful for you to enquire about, in the same way that asking about Endbringers seemed to bring about unreliable responses. Someone just on another level.

Nothing about it changed your thoughts, though. It was academic. You were absolutely certain that overcharging Eidolon would have a higher chance of driving off Endbringers than for Alexandria – perhaps as high as seventy five or eighty per cent. After all, he had a nearly fifty percent success rate even without being overcharged. He was just that guy.

Another thing to pass along to Cinereal, at least, and maybe she would be able to organise some kind of session where you could find out. Offering overcharges to everyone in the Protectorate seemed like a pain; boring and unproductive, given how few of them you would ever actually see a battlefield with, and even in those rare cases where you might share the same fight the odds of someone like a Triumvirate member not getting priority were slim to almost none. It was a waste of time and resources. But getting to find out exactly what would happen if you overcharged the big three? That seemed like it would be stupid not to.

Headache mounting, you left off from the questions for the time being, and concentrated on your work. Connecting a few small wires and attaching the modules via lengths of re-enforced mono-filament wires to your communication module allowed your voice to function on both things at once and prevented the need to program up something new that would completely run the new toolkit. You were a capable programmer for a fifteen year old, but your tinker's instinct didn't seem much inclined to software and you certainly weren't a professional. Good for fifteen, it turns out, is equivalent to pretty entry-level in the grander scheme of things; you were capable, not a prodigy.

The voice cancellation software wasn't going to be perfect. It would need to hear a voice before it could do anything and in that space of time, there was always a chance of you being given some kind of command. But once it had a voice, you would be able to prevent that particular villain from pressing you further, and hopefully the team training you had done to prepare for masters would help you overcome a single command or piece of obfuscation like Alienate had been performing during the run-in with Octave.

With that done, you decided that it was time to get out of the workshop. Most of the morning had been spent, back arched in uncomfortable crustacean fashion, working and thinking, and between the ache in your lumbar spine and the ache in your head you were very much ready to be anywhere else.

You checked the time; early afternoon setting in, the sun was still high in the sky.

Running your schedule through your head, you had three options. The first was just to go home and study, the standard Thursday behaviour. You ruled it out immediately. With your head where it was, it wasn't really an option.

The second was to go out on patrol, but that was ruled out for the same reason.

Third option was to do something casual, and you knew just what to do; Rachel volunteered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if you had your rights about you, she would still be working at the shelter until nearly five, so there was plenty of time left.

Spending some time following instructions from a friend and helping them with something they cared about sounded a lot more pleasant and more productive than lying on your bed and trying to suppress a headache, and a hell of a lot better than trying to fight a villain.

Luckily, you'd stored a change of clothes in one of the spare Ward's rooms, along with a domino mask for the sake of moving in and out of the buildings; past experiences added up, and having already been forced to make civilian exits from the Atlanta PRT headquarters you weren't going to be caught out again.

Maybe wearing one of the dominoes under the helmet would even be a good idea. You weren't sure what it would take to break Rhizome's work, but if the thing was truly indestructible it probably would have cost even more than it did and its unbreakable nature would have been part of the advertising. It wasn't, and it didn't, so you presumed that breakage was possible and knowing your luck it would happen in front of a bunch of civilians and your identity would be spilled.

A domino in the utility belt would help at least a little bit, and if you were already carrying it you might as well wear it beneath the helmet. Eye holes might need enlarging just enough to make sure that you weren't having your peripheral vision ruined, but you'd spent the first few weeks as a parahuman hero wearing a morph mask and that had placed a milky film over everything you saw. Having dealt with that made you feel equipped to deal with the slightly discomfort of a small mask under the helmet as long as it remove the threat of being caught unawares and having your life ruined.

You got changed and put on the mask before heading out of the back of the headquarters without much furore. There was no expectation for you to be there in the afternoon anyway, so you didn't need to inform anyone you were leaving, but you still send Melder a text message just to make sure that he was aware.

You wondered whether it was coincidence or whether they selected the Ward leaders purposefully to maximise the level of officious professionalism available; both Aegis and Melder had a similar kind of pleasant secretarial manner about them. Nothing strange, but just the sort of thing that made you think that they both understood the handbook on a level that most people saved for works of moral philosophy.

Nothing bad had come of it though, so you weren't going to push back. Everyone, it seemed, needed something to believe in.

Making your way to the shelter didn't take too long. Neither you nor Rachel had been really aware of where you were going the first time you made the trip and as a result you had spent more than an hour wandering around blindly until she had caught scent of something. The actual distance wasn't that far, but the breadth of your movements had devoured time. Now, with a target in mind, you were able to set a course immediately and it took less than twenty minutes on foot to make your way there.

Driving would have been another matter; each day that you lived in Atlanta you were considering it more and more of a miracle that Dad was making it to work each day in a truck. The entire city seemed to be composed of a bustling pedestrian city built precariously around a single all-consuming traffic jam.

Once you were there, you walked up to the woman at the reception; the same cheery woman you remember from the last time.

'Hey,' you spoke, clearing your throat from the surprisingly scratchy sound that came out. Apparently a morning spent tinkering and thinking didn't make for a smooth conversational tone. 'Is Rachel still here?'

'Oh, I remember you! You were Rachel's little friend, from when she first came. Tyler, was it?'

'Taylor.'

'Yes, Taller, of course, forgive me! She's still here, would you like to be led through? Please don't touch anything, as someone who is not signed up as a volunteer we are not insured for you to interact with any of the animals.'

Eyebrows raising in surprise at the warning, you nodded. 'Yes please.'

'Alright, follow me.'

Rapidly, the back room door was pushed open and you walked around to make it behind the counter before following the woman through.

The entire shelter was, you thought, cleaner than expected. Not exactly an animal expert, you had still thought that there would have been more mess and debris, but it seemed almost sparklingly clean; as though each evening was spent meticulously mopping the floors and polishing the cabinets.

Whether that was true or not, you couldn't say, and in fact it seemed impractical given the small number of employees, but it spoke to the high standard of hygiene they kept.

'Rachel, your little friend is here!'

Your headache was starting to impose upon you, largely in a desire to get you to stop the woman from projecting her faultlessly cheery demeanour with such force. You couldn't blame her for being happy and you wouldn't want to take it away from her, but you did wish she could use an inside voice while she was inside.

Rachel, it seemed, agreed.

She was wearing thick clothing covered in fur and grass stains, and you were shocked that she wasn't pouring with sweat.

'Mmm.'

'I'll just leave you two darlings here, please catch up but remember, please keep your friend away from the animals and the cages,' she said before turning back to you – 'fingers to yourself!'

With that, the woman vanished again, presumably back to take up her station at the front of the shelter, and Rachel looked at you blandly.

'Grab that,' she said, gesturing at a large bag of food. 'We're filling the bowls.'

'You sure? She seemed pretty certain. I don't want to get you in trouble.'

'If a dog in here can bite you bad enough to hurt, we would want to know anyway. Grab that.'

She gestured again, before turning to grab a large bottle of filtered water.

'Sure thing, captain.'

Ducking away before Rachel had time to shoot you a glare powerful enough to pierce your flesh, you grabbed the bag and started following orders. You were right – it was a much better decision to come and spend time with Rachel than on algebra.

Friday, 13th​ May

Waking up a little early, you decided not to lounge in bed. You had too much to do. Luckily, sharing the house with Dad meant that just because you woke up early didn't mean you were alone, and you ended up at the table eating breakfast alongside him, still wearing the oversized t-shirt and sweatpants that made up your pyjamas.

The two of you talked off and on, but the conversation was light. Your mind was elsewhere.

Since spending so much time the previous day trying to lock down on tactics to deal with other parahumans and trying to figure out their powers, you had been plagued with dreams of the same happening to you. Someone who worked for Octave trying to figure you out with the same tenacity. Maybe they didn't have Percentile to provide direct solutions, but there were a few of their parahumans whose powers were poorly understood or completely unknown. Maybe there was a thinker among them.

And even if there wasn't, you still worried about The Watcher. Of course, they'd been willing to give you a heads up but you knew that they were for hire, and there was always a chance that they would get a request any day to try and find information on you.

Worrying for yourself was pointless. You were as prepared as you could be and for most parahumans, the act of trying to take you against your will was essentially just an act of delegated suicide. Taking Dad though? That was a much easier prospect.

The idea of Scald and Slag turning up at your home and pulling him out of bed while you were away at headquarters, or getting him on his way home from work, was a hideous image that you couldn't quite shake.

Chances that any villains in the city that I can enquire into is trying to find my civilian identity?

4%

Relief wasn't quite the word. Nothing shy of a zero would have brought relief. But knowing that it was either only the side project of one person, or that there wasn't much effort being put into the search, meant a lot.

Chances that Dad is going to get kidnapped in the next few weeks?

0%

That was more like it. Unwritten rules were unwritten for a reason and unfortunately that meant that they often went unpunished. You didn't really know how the villains of the city treated things thus far. From what you knew there hadn't been a major breach in the same way that New Wave had experienced back when they had first allowed their personal identities to become public knowledge, but that could easily just have been a result of your own ignorance rather than the consequence of any allegiance to decorum among the villainous population of Georgia

No, you only had so much trust in your heart and very little of it was allocated to people like The Count or the folks at Inheritance.

As Dad packed up his stuff for work and bundled himself off into his truck, leaving you with a hug and a promise that he'd be home in time for dinner, you set off to the PRT as well. You always had things to do, and the prospect of a quick patrol through the city centre sounded like a good one.

The air was still, but you had gotten used to that. Humidity was starting to become more of a curse than actual heat on some days, and you had taken to using the trick with plunging the temperature down with Shadow Snare simply for comfort. Since discovering it in the Ward's room, it had become a bit of a staple, and even Dad had appreciated it when you had showed him how it worked. Better than any fan, as far as you were concerned, since it seemed to leech heat out without just pushing around the warm air in the way that a fan could.

In the air, it wasn't really viable. There was less opportunity to find yourself in shadow when you were above the streets, and you didn't really want to start associating your presence with cold spells among the general public. It felt like it would be bad for PR.

As the heat beat down on you, already warmer than you preferred in the early morning, you ran back through the questions you had asked the day before. There was a lot of clarification in it, but also mystery. Eidolon – you had tested again – was still coming back as inconclusive, and you weren't sure why. You'd inform Flashdrive or Cinereal or whoever you saw about your results the moment you arrived at headquarters, but the entire thing still felt confusing.

You'd run out of questions the day before, but with a fresh bunch, you wondered if there was anyone else who might have a chance of pushing back against the Endbringers if overcharged. It was hard to even thing of who the candidates might be.

Running through some of more prominent names gave you nothing. Dragon, apparently, offered very little promise – which made sense, as a tinker she would be more inclined to fugue than to suddenly become stronger in a practical sense. Narwhal, too, a regular at Endbringer fights, didn't really seem to experience a significant jump in likelihood. She'd been only slightly lower than Legend – perhaps a better result than you had expected, but nothing spectacular.

Knowing that villains also participated in Endbringer fights opened up the list a little, but there was a firm rejection from Percentile when you tried to feed Jack Slash in; he had no chance. The Siberian had come back as inconclusive too, though you didn't really know why. Scoffing to yourself, you figured that she probably wouldn't even need overcharging; she'd been able to do terrible things just in her regular state. Empowering her even further sounded like an elaborate deathwish.

Not wanting to waste all of your day's questions on idle running, you thought hard about who else might stand an actual chance of making a difference. There were a lot of parahumans, many of whom were strong, but that didn't have powers that put themselves in a frontline role. Anyone who would benefit from an overcharge to the extent that they were capable of taking down an Endbringer, or at least forcing one to quit, had to be someone who was already in the upper echelons of power before the boost. That just seemed like common sense.

The more you thought about it, the more a name imposed itself upon you. You didn't even want to ask about it. It seemed foolish, almost as reckless to consider as the Siberian. But if anyone had a track record of fighting against the Endbringers, one on one, and coming out in a favourable light, it was him. Sitting there, in the Bay.

You swallowed the lump in your throat.

Percentile, chances that overcharging Lung would allow him to drive an Endbringer off?

86%

Having completed your construction bots and, in doing so, having also made major tinker based upgrades to your suit (helmet megaphone + limited mastering resistance), you have levelled up and may select a new power type.