7.10

7.10

The revelation that Lung could be of such utility in the case of Endbringer fight probably shouldn't have been so surprising, but it didn't make you feel any better.

Nevertheless, as soon as you arrived at headquarters, you rushed to let Flashdrive know. As your usual first point of contact, it made sense to pass things on through him more than through Glacial or Undercut – on the rare occasions you actually ran into them – and he was thankfully good-natured about being used as something of a messenger pigeon.

While you could otherwise avoid her, and in fact had been given the advice to do so in most cases by others, the Protectorate members themselves had to meet with Cinereal on a somewhat regular basis anyway and Flashdrive at least didn't seem to mind being the bearer of whatever brand of bad news you brought along on any given day. The idea that Penumbra would go home, ask herself a bunch of questions, and then turn up the next morning with some kind of sour discovery had apparently become fairly expected and you'd only been present a little under a month; what a pleasant way to make yourself known to everyone.

Surprisingly, Flashdrive didn't see the need to pass the information to Cinereal, though.

'She doesn't go to Endbringer fights, none of us do really,' he said, turning the lug on a bolt with enough force that you worried for it briefly. 'Don't have the right type of skills, mostly. And she doesn't talk a lot with the Protectorate heads – there's some bad blood, personality clashes and stuff. Better to tell Shrugg about this kind of thing.'

Flashdrive put down his tool with a quiet clatter and swiped his hand ineffectually across the brow of his mask, doing a fine job of achieving nothing at all. 'He'll keep the relevant people informed.'

With that, he put down his equipment and headed out, not even bothering to remove the oily rag from his shoulder. Anything involving an Endbringer was apparently high alert, for reasons that you understood implicitly, but it did make for a funny sight. You wondered how Piggot would have reacted to Kid Win traipsing into her office still dripping grease from a new invention, and the picture of her distaste your imagination conjured was powerful enough to pass as a real memory.

Whatever issues you had with Piggot's slightly abrasive personality, you couldn't deny that you missed her a little. She was a straight shooter, and although she clearly had standards that you only barely met – and that barely anyone else did at all – they were consistent. You still weren't sure where you stood with Cinereal; she had been pleased enough to hear about you capturing villains, you'd heard that much from her herself though perhaps not in so many words, but you got the sense that she still thought you should have just killed everyone at the Octave meeting.

It was hard to really disagree, on a matter of pure practicality, but going straight for the kill still felt alien to you. Uncomfortable. You weren't sure if that would ever change.

With Flashdrive out of the workshop, you took the opportunity to try and put your scanners into action. While you intended to ask others for their help at some point (and of course, with the ultimate goal of potentially helping Tritium still bouncing around in the back of your mind) it made sense to you to try things on yourself first.

Not only would you feel much more comfortable harming yourself if something went wrong rather than accidentally doing some disservice to a team mate, but you had questions lingering over your own power that had cropped up months earlier and had still been unanswered. Those questions had only grown with what few pieces of information had come out from the medical examinations, and if it was possible for you to get some real confirmation of something, you wanted it. Even if it was only the mechanisms of a specific power.

Unfortunately, you didn't get much luck. Setting up the scanners was easy enough – you had located the ones in your gloves to be fairly easy to remove, and setting them up on a table that you could stand in front of was just basic planning. Getting them to run via voice command was fine too, since the module that ran it was still part of the communication device in your helmet.

The results, though, were unimpressive.

You started with Atlas. Nothing much came from that, but you didn't really expect it do; whatever was happening there, if it was explicable at all, seemed to be taking place entirely within your own body and it would take a different type of scanner to pick it up (even assuming it could be picked up at all). Returning nothing from Fairy Wings, however, was a little less intuitive; there was clearly something there, wavelengths of light if nothing else from the glow, but while the scanner could perceive light intake and was willing to tell you how bright the wings were and what frequency sound they were putting off, there was nothing to suggest that they were more than simply holograms.

When even trying out the Force Push – a power you knew could be scanned, because Flashdrive had done so – gave nothing at all other than a measure of the movement things being hit took, you gave it up as a bad job.

Another annoyance of your powers; they were, it seemed, fighting back from discovery.

Intellectually, you knew that probably wasn't the case. It was probably just some ridiculous arcane piece of parahuman trivia about not being able to scan yourself; most tinkers didn't get the chance to find out because they often had no additional powers on top of the tinkering, and you were just an exception.

But that didn't make it less frustrating. You wanted answers, and months had gone by with little to no real confirmation of suspicions or even firm denial of speculation, and it was getting tired; how did other parahumans deal with it? Of course, you recognised that your own power was uniquely irritating by virtue of being unusual in terms of function but the reality was that, as far as you could tell and as far as Vicky's patient explanations informed you, nobody really knew how powers worked. Not at the basic level. Every single parahuman out there was running around with something going on that they couldn't explain, and while you had more questions than most you could at least take solace in the fact that you hadn't had them long.

The Triumvirate had been parahumans longer than you had been alive. Some capes had been parahumans more than twenty years. How they'd managed it without going absolutely mad was beyond you; the uncertainty was painful.

Thinking about Vicky and powers reminded you of her comment about the Birdcage. While you were sure that whoever it was in there who claimed to understand powers on any level was either some sort of mad scientist tinker, a maladjusted liar, or both, the reminder about the Birdcage didn't do much to set you at ease.

Dragon's predicament still weighed on your mind. While you didn't really know anything about it in the specifics, you knew that she didn't really like how things ran at the Birdcage and you knew that she wasn't really able to change it. That in itself seemed weird.

Dragon was many things, but powerless was never one of them. Since rising to prominence when you were just a kid, she had taken the world of parahumans by storm. She was, seemingly, everywhere; any major battle that she could be involved in, she was. Far from being the stereotypical tinker sat back in the lab and providing tools while avoiding personal risk, Dragon was at the frontlines against Endbringers and S-Class threats more often than probably any other parahuman in the world; the only person who could probably make a real argument for having more insane combat situations under their belt was Eidolon, and even he probably only managed that because of seniority. He'd been a parahuman longer than Dragon had; almost by as much as she'd been senior to you. In terms of density of danger, though, Dragon probably had even him beaten.

The idea of her being pressured into something sounded outrageous. If anyone had the pull and power, the reputation and the notoriety, the respect and the nous to change things, it had to be Dragon.

So either she quite literally could not change things – there was no mechanism for her to even attempt it, which seemed incredibly unlikely – or there was a force you didn't know of stopping her from pursuing that end.

Chances that Dragon is being blackmailed in some way about the Birdcage?

78%

You inhaled sharply enough that if you weren't alone in the workshop, someone would have questioned you.

That was not good. Who could possibly have anything on Dragon that she couldn't just deal with? And more importantly, what could be so important for her to keep secret that she would continue keeping the Birdcage the way it was, against her own desires? It had to be something bad – maybe something from before she had become famous? - but even the possibility of embarrassment didn't seem to justify it.

Whatever was true about the Birdcage, it wasn't right. There needed to be, at least, much stricter rules for entry. That much was a given. The fact that Dragon would be willing to sit back and let people get put into a situation like that, even if they didn't truly deserve it, just to save herself from some bad PR, seemed impossible. Just not something she'd do. She wasn't the type.

Chances that there's some kind of mental manipulation at play? Has she been mastered? Financially forced? Is she protecting someone else? A split personality?

Answers came through thick and fast as you pushed a bunch of questions through fast enough that you could feel the beginnings of a headache starting to manifest. Cutting yourself off before you pushed hard enough to go mad, you thought over the responses.

No mental manipulation. Not mastered. Not bribed (you had to ask, even if the very idea of it seemed ludicrous). Not protecting anyone else. No split personality either (again, something you expected; even if Dragon had some sort of mental health issue like that, it was clearly very in control).

Straight up blackmail seemed mundane, though. You couldn't even begin to think of a who, let alone a what or a why.

Not sure what to do with the information, you left the workshop puzzled. You still had things to do with the day, and hopefully by allowing the information to stew a little bit you could come up with something more productive than just wondering.

Distractedly, you wandered down to requisitions and enquired about whether or not they had some kind of sound control system that could augment or replace your own makeshift voice cancellation. The answer was no, and you put in a request to tap the network and see if there was anything that could be brought in from elsewhere; the system you had come up with would work, you were pretty sure of that, but it was kludged together out of spare ideas and you could tell that it was only just on the borderline of what your tinker specialty was going to allow. Sound manipulation was another thing entirely. If they could get something from someone who actually knew what they were doing – an audio-tech tinker, perhaps – then that would almost certainly work better than what you had.

With the order placed, you started to make your way out of that section of the building before noticing a small, strangely slim door with a thin brass plaque on the front. You'd not noticed it before, though you forgave yourself for that; it was small and unobtrusive, and there was a small box sat in front of it that told you that either the people inside had gotten used to being blockaded in or the people outside didn't really care too much about their clear exit. A fire hazard, if nothing else.

Scooting the box out of the way with the side of your foot, you knocked on the door. Up close, you could see the brass plaque – covered in a thick layer of verdigris – read Public Relations, and a call from inside ushered you in quickly.

'Hello?'

'Hello there, how can I help you?'

You moved inside the room with the kind of tentative steps better suited to a paranormal investigator or some kind of landmine scout. The floor was littered with boxes, mostly a sort of nondescript grey with PRT logos stamped across, but there was the occasional splash of colour that betrayed the presence of a parahuman's logo, or of some publicity stills.

On the far wall, behind two cramped desks that were sat back-to-back, you could see a large cork-board with a number of images pinned to it. You were in a few of the images, though you recognised that they weren't all recent; one was clearly from your clearance of the boat graveyard back in Brockton Bay, an impressive distance shot showing almost the entirety of a large boat – difficult to judge precisely, but maybe seventy feet in length – being hauled out.

Though the detail was sketchy even up close, let alone at distance, it was enough to remind you of the crushing volume of the water as it spilled around, filling the void left by the boat. The ocean was so large, you still had trouble even thinking of it. Seemed like wherever there was a gap, it could get in.

At one of the two desks, there was a woman with short red hair and the sort of round cheeks that told you that she probably smiled a lot. Her glasses, thin rimmed and gold, were perched on the end of her nose but with the kind of crookedness that suggested they had slipped there, rather than had been placed. A colourful broach sat on her lapel, the shape of a bumble-bee, and glittered.

'Nice to meet you,' you said, not sure where to start. 'I saw the room and thought I would say hello. I haven't really run into anyone from PR before.'

'No, I don't expect you have!' the woman said, springing up from her seat. Her height barely changed, and you were shocked; she couldn't have been more than five feet tall, you were sure of it. 'Amanda Roath, at your service,' she said, holding out a hand.

You shook it, ignoring the surprising pointedness of her nails. Glittering in sympathy with the broach, they too were a bright gold gel. She'd had them for only a few days – got them done mid-week. Took around an hour.

Blinking to yourself, you wondered where that came from. While you'd never taken the trio's admonishments too seriously, aware that they were trying to be mean more than they were trying to be upholders of beauty standards, they weren't wrong when they had pointed out how plain you were. Nothing about the trappings of feminine beauty really seemed to appeal to you, especially after Mom had died; she'd been a mixture of natural beauty and fierce anti-patriarchal politics, meaning she'd spent most of her time looking like someone who had spent hours in front of the mirror without ever having done so, and being slightly unaware of why anyone else would feel the need to do so.

Abandoning the pursuit of traditional beauty seemed like the right thing to do after she'd passed. It was easier for you, cost less money, and felt justified both in terms of adhering to her memory and in terms of representing how you felt to the world on the outside. Glum, displeased with everything.

All that to say, you had no idea when you'd learned anything about nail treatments or the aesthetics thereof. Something you must have picked up in the background, somehow. Not important.

You could feel your headache throbbing; maybe a few too many questions that morning. When you got back home you already planned to take some of the painkillers. Getting used to popping them too often was a horrible idea, even if only for the potential of side-effects and addiction, but you didn't really like surrendering your critical faculties either. Imagining being out of it the night that Vicky had called for help with Hookwolf was nightmarish. Just one couldn't hurt, though.

'I'm Penu-'

'Penumbra, yes, of course. Well, if you're here you might as well get comfortable – take a seat, darling.'

There didn't seem to be anywhere around to take a seat other than at the empty desk, so you spun the chair around and plunked yourself down. It creaked ominously.

'I would offer you a cup of coffee, but the machine is down the hall. So, your first conflict with public relations, eh? Figure me surprised. You did such a marvellous job up there in Brockton of course, I just assumed.'

She continued on that trend for a few minutes, re-organising papers on her desk while she spoke. Everything about her demeanour was a combination of eagerness and friendliness. It didn't seem artificial, but it did seem unpractised; you got the idea that she spent most of her time looking at a screen or on the phone, instead of speaking to someone in person.

Eventually, her comments moved back around to you, and she batted the ball back into your half of the court. 'So, is there anything on your mind? That I could help you with?'

'Not really,' you admitted. 'I was more just interested in meeting you. Maybe asking about my merchandise – I know it was in my contract but I haven't really seen too much about that.'

'Well most people have no need to meet me. Honestly, rather a convoluted thing but old Cinny up there has the entire city in her palm, even if she doesn't like it. No need for big press events like in Houston – Eidolon, an absolutely pleasant man but hardly the most dynamic personality, I have to say, not really a compelling speaker in the way that Legend is – because they've bought entirely into her outward presentation. There's something to be said about living in a city with so many issues but frankly it does wonders for your image; just actually make things better and people are willing to give you all the good will in the world.'

There was a hint of condescension in the explanation, as though Roath thought there was something amusing in that – the idea of believing in something without an ad campaign maybe contradicting with her marketing and press experience telling you to do so – but it didn't seem mean spirited enough for you to push back on. Part of you just wanted to get out of the room more quickly and letting her answer your questions seemed like the quickest way to go about that.

'As for merchandise my darling, it's a mixed situation. Such a shame you chose a dark colour scheme but there's nothing to be done about that now, it's known to everyone, a rebrand now would probably do more harm than good, the pity. In any case, a lot of merchandise gets sold to the youth market, children and such, and brighter colours always work there – no mother wants to put her daughter in something so brooding, you understand – but the figurines are doing rather well. I'm told there was some degree of scalping with the first batch but that only drives up demand for later, so there's no issue with that.'

Numbers began to emerge; sales figures, profit margins, and fairly quickly you felt lost. None of it really interested you – even the idea that you would get some payment at the end of the quarter was more of a curious perk than a real conversation churner – and Roath didn't seem to be running out of ways to tell you that a purple costume lacked appeal to the parental buyer.

Catching sight of the clock, you saw the minutes pass. Ten, then fifteen, and your headache was starting to pulse. Nobody had sat in the chair you were in since April, and you were starting to wonder if maybe there was a reason for that – though you couldn't help but wonder how you even knew that with so much confidence. Your brow furrowed beneath your mask but Roath, oblivious to what she couldn't see, continued to talk until she tailed off.

Cinereal's merchandise had apparently done quite well recently, though her refusal to allow the printing of a dakimakura had apparently turned the marketing team against her yet again. The last time such a thing had happened was when Alexandria had turned down an offer to appear in an action movie in the late nineties, before things with the film industry had truly collapsed. Apparently the compulsions of the marketing department and the intersection such a thing had with PR were undeniable.

Eventually, you managed to extricate yourself from the office, crediting your headache, and Roath allowed you to move out with a promise to make yourself available for a press conference and a pledge to return. You weren't really sure whether you would, but if you did, it wasn't likely to be soon.

Head swimming, you decided to head up to the Ward's room. Plans for a patrol were still on, and as long as you stuck to somewhere outside of Octave territory you were pretty sure that you could get along well enough even with the headache. It hadn't reached migraine levels yet, and as long as that was true, you could still go about your day.

Maybe something in Runner's territory, or even just patrolling somewhere to be seen. Not really common in Atlanta, but it couldn't hurt – you weren't exactly the kind of person who needed a lot of attention but being recognised positively in Brockton Bay had been a nice change of pace and if you were able to emulate that in Atlanta it would probably keep public relations off your back in the same way that they already allowed Cinereal to do things her own way.

Press conferences sounded like a pain and, frankly, something too dangerous – you'd just be inviting some malignant criminal to make an event of it. Repeating a PHO Q&A, or even something pre-filmed to be released online, sounded like an option though. You'd run it by someone, but it seemed to fill most of the needs of both the city and the PRT more broadly, so it was probably a good idea.

Scrivener and Rachel were already in the room waiting for you. There was no set time for the afternoon patrol, but you knew that they – like basically everyone – would probably prefer to get it done earlier rather than later, if possible. Heading out into the dark was a recipe for some kind of ambush, and if honestly, it just wasn't necessary. Crime didn't really wait for nightfall in Atlanta, if you knew where to go for it, and you knew that from first-hand experience.

'Hey, you ready to head out?'

'Definitely.'

You could use the air, if nothing else.

Saturday, 14th​ May

Dad had gone out again to the craft store. He'd left another note on the table, this time talking about getting some new instructional books for more complicated projects, and you left him to it. As long as he was enjoying himself, who were you to judge?

Patrol the day before had been easy enough. You'd stuck to Runner territory, as per your own request, and had seen nothing. Rachel had picked up a scent that she was certain lead to a drug depot, or something potentially more nefarious, but when you had tracked it to its source there was nothing. Scrivener had speculated that Roc had flown away with whatever it was – it was the only way he could think of that the scent would cut off so abruptly on the ground level.

After getting back to headquarters, you'd spent a few minutes consulting the pair on their thoughts about your idea for some public outreach.

Rachel was wholly disinterested. While she didn't actively oppose it, and didn't tell you not to, you could tell that the idea of doing something purely to engage with the citizens of the world was far from high on her list of priorities. Something of a punishment, if anything.

Scrivener had been a little more charitable. Apparently unconvinced, you could tell that even if the idea of it was something foreign to him, but he hadn't rejected the idea out of hand. Instead, he'd just told you that you'd have to find someone else to help you manage it, since he tried to avoid posting in the threads often on PHO. Something about being on his last strike before a permanent ban – no elaboration was given on why that might be the case.

Still, it was some support for your plan, and determined that you were going to go ahead with it at some point. Maybe in one of the afternoons that you would generally reserve for homework. Tuesday or Thursday of the next week had nothing booked in, and seemed opportune for you to settle down and answer some questions.

Running it differently sounded like a good idea, though. Rather than trying to keep up with answering as things went, just opening questioning for an hour or so and then answering things as a single block. With it streamlined like that, there was even a chance you could do it more often than you had in the past – every other week, perhaps.

No firm answer had to come immediately. You had plenty of time to think about things, and, as you stared at the homework in front of you musing of literally anything else you could imagine, plenty of reason to spend that time lost in contemplation. Scrivener had even been amenable to letting you scan him at some point, so that was frankly killing two birds with one stone, and you couldn't really get too upset about that even if you were still left with questions to answer.

Sticking to Runner territory for now sounded like a pretty good idea. They seemed achievable, and you wanted to get something done, and from what you could tell they also had the fewest potential masters on the roster. Keeping things focused might allow you to make more of an impact than just spreading yourself out too thin, and perhaps a more intense and targeted search could allow you to leverage Rachel's senses to track them.

It didn't even seem too unusual a prospect. The moment you turned the door handle to enter the room, you knew they'd only been there an hour earlier, at the most.

And wasn't that unusual? You'd noticed since the day before, you'd been having moments like that. Slight instances where you just knew things that you couldn't really have any right to know. At first, you had brushed it off as knowledge you didn't even know you had. Picked up on the peripheries of other research, or by some sort of cultural osmosis. A good case, in the case of the chair.

But patrol had made things more clear. Time and again you had touched something and realised something minor about it, something that you just knew to be irrefutably true in the same way that you knew you had a mole on your left foot or that you brushed your teeth starting on the left side of your mouth. It was just a fact, and nobody could even begin to convince you otherwise.

You'd thought about it for a while, and as ridiculous as it seemed, you had come to expect as much. It had to be a new power. Something thinker based seemed obvious, and some experimentation had unveiled things over the course of the morning.

As you sat there on your bed, extending your consciousness into your pen, you suddenly knew a lot more about what it was like to be kept in a packet on a shelf for several weeks than you had ever really wanted to know – an examination of the cutting board had given you an impression of being used only that morning, when you had done no such thing.

Bacon. Dad must have made a sandwich or something.

It was an eerie sort of feeling, and you pledged to report it to the PRT on Monday when you went in. More power testing, just in case there was something to it that you couldn't pick up from cursory examination. You were starting to get sick of it; maybe one of these days you'd just get a new power that was straightforward. Fairy Wings hadn't been complicated like this.

Even through that revelation, you kept your mind focused on the Runners. Generally procedure, no matter whether you were a hero or a villain, was to aim at the tinker first. Force multipliers like trumps and thinkers, they were imperative to take off the battlefield. So, you contemplated what you knew about the Runners.

Burroughs was their tinker. You weren't entirely sure what his specialty was, or how it worked, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was whether you could get him.

Chances that I could bring in Burroughs in the next two weeks or so if I underwent a concerted campaign to do so?

81%

You smirked to yourself. Sometimes being a thinker was just playing life on easy mode.

Chances that a bold approach would be best, in terms of ease and minimising risk to the public?

27%

Sneaky, then. The good thing about asking questions like that was that you saved another question: if sneaky wasn't the best approach, clearly something more bold was. Simple.

You spent a little more time asking yourself basic questions, mostly revolving around location, but couldn't get much further than him likely being in the Northern part of Runner territory at that given moment. He seemed to move, and the probability of him being in a single spot didn't seem to stick at above fifty percent unless you were specifically asking about that precise moment, and you weren't about to head out on your own to try and raid somewhere on a hunch.

Part of the difficulty of working within the Wards system was having to keep people up to date on things. There were benefits to being in a team, you couldn't deny that – Alec and Rachel were your two of your best friends, some of the only people you really trusted at all, and you only had them with you because you were able to use the Wards to get them out of trouble in the first place. But that didn't mean you didn't sometimes miss being able to just go out and be a vigilante. Even for the Coil bust, you'd been technically freelancing.

Still, it was nice to have a target. Burroughs, with a sneaky approach, was a gettable target and that was something you could bring to Melder or someone and try and draw up a plan. You were pretty sure that nobody in the Protectorate would protest you deciding to just eliminate one of the local threats.

Throwing your pen down, you rolled off the bed and headed back downstairs. You needed to get out of the house. Schoolwork was either trivially easy at this point, or irritating in its formulation, and you had enough of it. Even with the clock still yet to hit noon, you had several hours of the stuff under your belt and that was too much for any morning. You didn't really even remember how you'd managed to deal with it back when you were at Winslow.

Though, at Winslow you had different priorities that had made the boring and mentally draining work seem like a blessing, if only for the distraction.

Instead, you were going to head out. There was still one thing left on your to-do list when it came to trying out new hobbies, and it would probably only take an hour or two out of your day. There was a good chance that you could be back home before Dad was, if he took as long this time as he had the last.

You were going swimming.

Actions Remaining:

- Work on designing some kind of restraint method with your tinkertech

- Work on your tinkertech in this order: suits (3)

- Hold a Q&A with the Atlanta community, preventing Regent and Scrivener from 'helping'

- Make small video recorders that can be carried by animals

- Try to make plans with Scrivener outside of work; he seems nice enough.

Lots of stuff here. We scanned ourselves, looked into PR and merch, found out some stuff about Burroughs, asked some questions about Dragon and confirmed there's some sort of blackmail thing going on, got a new power - ready for testing! - finished off our final hobby trial, started looking into seeing if there's anything better for our voice cancellation stuff, and even got Scrivener agree to let us scan him at some point. Moving forward!

Lot of goals remaining: how do we achieve them? Leave your suggestions for goal-orientated actions, or just things you'd like to see, in the following format: