Spark, Kindling

I suppose it was lucky that my appointment was so early because I could be sure that Panacea wasn't here yet, I noted.

Thankfully the door into Oncology was a valid target for me to mark. As I headed away, I immediately realised I had another problem.

The only way I had to know if Panacea was coming was by using Power Scanner repeatedly to try and scan her power. Power Scanner wouldn't just turn on randomly as soon as it had a valid target. She could take hours to show up. I'd get bored of trying to catch her and miss her.

Crap crap crap what do I do.

Okay, James, don't panic. You have thirteen charges. You could just make a power to test for her.

Yeah, er… power list. Do I have anything I wanted anyways that could work? Err…

No time. I just need something that will keep checking. Can't waste the charge though.

We're basically automating it, right? Like writing a program or something? Maybe that would work. Not a bad power.

Okay, one lane to keep checking if she shows up while I'm workshopping this, one lane follows along with the doctor eight are going to see about the power automation thing.

Right so, focus. It needs to be simple, it needs to be straightforward. I need a power that can control my other powers and just have them do stuff automatically without me doing anything. Also, it needs to be able to tell me if something's happened. Um… what else… I'm basically making a power computer anyways, so why not go all the way, can I throw in untraceable internet or something? Nope takes it above a charge. Whatever, I'll do that later. Umm… mental acceleration? Not worth it. Okay, so a mental computer that does computer stuff and can control my powers. Um… it can tell if I'm using those powers, just in case, and it can like read those powers, need to make sure that the power actually does something… oh, it needs to be able to link my powers together.

What else? Umm… I mean, I can already watch videos and stuff with mindscape. Adding any sort of connection to technology stuff pushes into a level two… Umm… oh, if I focus on it with different lanes or just multiple times I can do different things.

Yeah, that works, just under one. Cool, Another charge just happened, so that's fine. Make it, and let's get this working.

I breathed a sigh of relief as the power took form and I was able to quickly set it to use the projector to test the mark every second or so for power and notify me.

By the time I had swung into the x-ray room, I was quite happy, I tested the alerts and they worked pretty well. The control over my other powers meant that it could just grab one of my lanes and force me to focus on the alert.

I had even managed to mostly keep access to Projector. It didn't actually use Projector for all that long, just a tiny fraction of a second to quickly check if it could detect any capes in the area. So, since I set it to just sort of interrupted my control over Projector for a second to do the check, and returned it before I had a chance to notice.

Still,l it seemed to be working.

By the time my x-ray had finished, the relief had vanished and was replaced by annoyance. The power I had created wasn't nearly as good as it could have been, and I had wasted a charge on it.

I should have made the mental acceleration power first and taken my time creating it.

The waste irked me.

Still, I suppose it wasn't terrible. Having a power that did 'computer things' was surprisingly broad. I didn't program it really, not like writing the stuff for Mrs Knott's class. I didn't write specific code or anything. I just gave it a series of steps and it just kind of did it.

I'd probably have to learn more about computers to use this power properly though.

Still, it would do. Still better than my Evaluator power. I used most of the charge, even if it wasn't the most efficient thing in the world.

I pondered over my thoughts as the doctor ran the Dremel along the cast.

"Keep on the crutches for a while, but beyond that, if anything hurts, like at all, just stop and sit down or something. You should be all good in a week or two."

I nodded absently, still distracted by the thought of being able to study Panacea's power. Honestly, I had nearly six charges I would be willing to spend on a healing power after seeing her power, and if that went through I'd be able to just patch up my leg freely. If I was lucky, I'd even be able to head to the gym freely.

I thanked the doctor and hobbled out with my mom.

I didn't get a hit until lunch.

One of my lanes immediately took control using the opportunity to target the cape in range. A feral grin spread across my face as I set upon their power.

A grin that fell off my face as soon as I saw what I was analysing.

I'm fairly sure this was Panacea, but… there was a lot more to her power than I could have imagined. It wasn't healing, or at least not only healing. It was a lot more free form than that. Her power, if she chose to use it that way was effectively total control over biology with an entire bio tinker package mixed in. I watched as she healed cancer, twisting the tumours back into proper cells and altering DNA in order to repair the damage.

I could see as her power pulled up strange alternatives to twist her patient into something else, and I grew something of an appreciation for her. I could see parts of her power pushing her to use it in new violent ways. In fact, there was a portion of her power had a deliberate modification that wanted to make its wielder fight.

Still even dropping that her power was easily a tenth level charge to replicate, and dropping the touch restriction brought it down to nine at most.

That didn't mean that there wasn't anything I could use.

Panacea's power was still fairly modular. And while the whole package was fairly expensive, there were parts I could use.

In rough segments, her power broke down into seven parts. After the targeting, you had the scanning part, which would analyse a target space, and then a filter that would process that information to give panacea a sense of the biology she was touching, in addition to a bunch of extra information it was pulling from its records. Then she could biotinker the body into whatever she wanted, any change she wanted to would be translated into a series of changes using another filter so that a specialised atomic manipulation power that moved atoms and did something related to activation energy using electromagnetic energy or something? I didn't really have the words to explain it, but it helped her turn whatever she was working with into whatever she wanted.

There were a lot of translation layers, and filters that helped her use her power like that. Her power was probably very easy to use. And since I hadn't heard anything about her creating biotinkered monstrosities I could only respect how much effort she put in to control herself.

And to think I was scared about accidentally doing physics problems with my powers in an exam, while Panacea is somehow holding the reigns of probably the most dangerous power I could imagine and using it to help people.

She's fucking badass, isn't she! I wonder if I could do something for her. I mean, maybe I could make a power for her so that her power is easier to use? I dunno. Maybe I could talk to her about it?

Anyways, when I broke it down, the costs were significantly lower, and more open to optimization. The filters for example were all separate, despite only requiring a small part of a single level one charge. My mental computer power actually might be able to do a good portion of the filtering, interfacing with the different powers, processing the data and returning it.

Between that, Reserve, Converter and Projector, I sort of had the ability to make changes? I mean, I wouldn't know what changes I should make, but I could replicate a good portion of the last section of her power with what I already had.

The front half too, since I just needed one more power to allow me to scan stuff. Which was pretty important anyways. The scanning section of Panacea's power was actually pretty awesome, more potent than anything I could have come up with. It had really pointed out weaknesses in my current converter setup, in all honesty.

Examining the data it collected as Panacea went through her rounds I could see just how much information it was gathering, so much of which was just thrown away and ignored. I didn't even have words to describe it, which had become a recurring problem for me in analysing her power.

My power lab worked to provide me with more detail and insight, but it didn't contextualise that for me. It was like getting more information about a car engine, and being able to tall that the fuel lines and the brake lines were different but not knowing what gas or brake fluid even was. I mean I was getting to the point that I could tell that the stuff in the fuel lines was being burned to make the engine turn and that the stuff in the brake lines was being used to push the brake plates, but I could only really tell the function of stuff relative to how it ended up being used in the powers as a whole.

So all that stuff that was thrown away? I didn't have any clue what it was.

My mindscape was littered with notes at this point. Or, well, not notes so much as ideas and concepts pinned to the wall as I tried to make more sense of her power.

The big cost came from the biotinker at the core of her power. That alone was a level eight charge. Well, if you included the database at least. If you didn't it went down to a four. But it was a level four charge I was actually considering spending. I'd have to analyse more tinker powers first, but I bet that this power was what laid at the heart of every tinker power. To be able to match ideas to these records and adapt them to fit the current situation.

Other tinker powers must have a part that helped them build their ideas, like Panacea's striker powers, but really it was this core power that was the true tinker powerset.

Of course, that power by itself probably wouldn't do much, probably just help me make stuff by showing me what I already know and how it matches the things I want, so I'd need more information to fuel it. Basically, I'd need the database. Making one myself was apparently extremely expensive, even what I thought of as a basic speciality, like alloys or something was super pricy, like level 7 all by itself.

I hadn't figured out why until I tried to find out how much it would cost to copy Panacea's repository, and it was cheap. Like, a level four charge cheap.

As far as I could figure out, making a tinker repository was expensive because it had to make the stuff in the repository too, but copying a tinker repository meant that I could get away with copying the stuff in their repository, and I only needed to spend charges making the repository bits.

Could I just learn the stuff then? I mean, if I built the tinker power to just feed off of my Mindscape and just learned the in the Tinker repositories, I wouldn't even need to spend any charges.

Hmmm… Might as well give it a shot. It's not like there's anything better to do at home, just kind of chill since my leg still hurts if I do more than take a few steps right now.

As her power created some interesting replacements for mitochondria - is the powerhouse of the cell - I followed the connection back into the database.

The connection split a few times, one that pointed at a human mitochondria thing and another pointing at some weird molecules? Another went to some human cells. The other two, however, went to something that looked very much like the replacement, only with a few bits changed, and another cell looking thing.

It was actually pretty interesting to look at. I mean, I could tell it kind of looked like mitochondria, it had the squiggly bits that are for surface area, and it looked pretty complicated. But perhaps more interesting is something that both I and Power Lab quickly picked up on.

The mitochondria bits were actually inside the cell bits, which meant that it might be possible to kind of zoom out to get more information.

So, I did, slowly zooming out, and analysing more and more of the thing until I was left looking at a strange insectoid creature. I didn't really have a good sense of how big it was, but it seemed like it was able to fly. So maybe not that big?

As I continued to poke around in the creature, I was quickly realising that I didn't know enough to learn about this. I mean, I kind of know about cells and stuff from Bio, but there was a lot of stuff here, especially the small bits that seemed important.

I basically had to learn more just to study these things so that I could do this.

I'm not sure that it was the best solution in the first place. As I zoomed out and saw the scale of the database, I think it would take way too long for me to learn it. I kinda get why conjuring this out of thin air would take such a huge charge.

Though that kind of raises the question, did this power just make up a bunch of things? Or are these like scans of things. Because, well, if they are scans, and I've never seen anything like this before, then all those people on PHO who think aliens gave us powers might actually be right about that.

Plus with seventeen charges at my disposal now, I could afford to spend a few on other powers.

I'll save the eight for what I'm going to call Tinker Core for now, but it's just going to be until I get a chance to compare it against another tinker. Just because I think this is a tinker power doesn't mean that it is a tinker power. And well, tinker powers are cool. Plus I could have gadgets and stuff! Oooh and a fancy costume!

That only leaves one free for now. The next charge is growing quickly, so I hope I'll be able to use it soon, but I did have one charge I could use right now if I wanted to.

I'm kinda tempted to use it to make that scanning power though. The last couple of days were a huge mess because getting feedback from my power was so hard. Something like this, that I could use to just get all the details and see if my powers are working and everything? That's pretty important.

And with the rate the new charge is growing, I wouldn't even mind spending an extra charge to set up something that made sense of it for me.

Hmm…

Okay, did I really need to save the charges for tinker powers? I mean, I'm waiting to look at other tinker powers first, but where am I supposed to find a tinker? It's not like I can just walk up to the PRT and ask to meet Armsmaster can I?

Though, I guess I could visit one of their like press events. They do those sometimes.

I'll have to look it up, but checking things online for my powers still kinda spooks me. Okay, I've been dealing with this for way too long, I need to just spend the damn charges on an internet power already.

Mentally pulling up the diagram of the internet in Mindscape, I considered the technology power again. The latest version I came up with was decent, but the project planning thing said that starting again with a new idea helped sometimes, so here i go.

I wanted the power to give me free unlimited internet that couldn't be tracked. And to make it more general, I'd like to be able to make it so that I can connect to all networks maybe? Or like, all computers?

Oh and phones and stuff. A lot of the new phones have cool features and stuff, so I want to be able to do that. Maybe it could work like a TV remote or something too, so maybe aim for like technology in general?

But what counts as technology?

Okay, looking up how a TV remote works can't trip anything right? Get over yourself James.

Nodding, I lifted my laptop from my desk over to me, and started looking things up. Remotes are actually pretty cool, they have like little computers in them. Actually… most of the stuff I want to control has little computers and stuff in them.

So, like the power goes back to that, basically I want control over… computers, like all the different kinds of computers. Plus undetectable internet access.

Well, you connected to the internet from routers and stuff, so I could probably just control a router and just have like internet access. They could probably trace it to the router though. Eh, that's fine. I'll just pick a router in the library or something. Maybe in one of those offices where they have fast internet or something.

So I'd have to what? Mark a router and leave the mark there forever? I mean, I could make more mark powers, but it feels kind of wasteful.

Range is kind of an issue, so I'm not sure I want to ever worry about it.

Hmm… do I want to spend a charge on this?

Yeah, making sure villains or the PRT don't find out where I live is worth a charge. So, I'll make another version of mark? Not really, this doesn't need the whole power, plus I don't want to have to connect to the router every time and yeah, not cool.

Um, so what I want a power that's like, here's a target other power? that works…

"James! It's lunchtime! Are you feeling good enough ot come down here?"

I shook myself out of my stupor, "Um, let me try mom!"

As left one of my other lanes to carry me down to the dining room, I fleshed out the power.

Basically, I wanted a power that let me target something even if it's not somewhere where Projector can reach it. So, I go there once, and I can just be permanently connected to it.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Like a version of mark that is instead of, I can use my powers from this thing as if I was there, it was just I can use my powers on this thing.

So I just use this power and make a target, and I just have my powers work on that target.

That works. Okay, if I do one target, what's the range I can get out of this. Range makes it cheaper. Okay, that's new. Damn, this is a cheap power. Okay, so like, global range, and I guess I'll do like a bunch of targets instead.

In the end, after optimising it, I came down to having ten Targets that I could choose, and my powers would connect to them regardless of where I was in the world.

Target took up one charge.

I decided to put off the electronics control power until after lunch.