Spark

My power seemed like it needed to recover, after making my tinker power, but over the last couple of weeks, I was still keeping busy. Panacea using her power almost every day healing meant that I had actually made a lot of progress in copying over her Repository, a lot more than Kid Win, who had only tinkered a few times.

It still wasn't everything. I had seriously underestimated how big Tinker Repositories were, and if what I was getting wasn't already really impressive, I would have been tempted to sink a few extra charges into making that go faster.

But today was a big day. Mom had finally been able to get the legal stuff squared away, and it was time for me to make my take my first real steps as a hero.

Today was the day that Halcyon made his debut. Not publicly, but mom had gotten in touch with a lawyer by the name of Leyton Wiles. He was one of many lawyers that had been brought up on the PHO boards about legal resources for independents. Mom had checked them all using my secure internet and talked to some people she knew.

He had checked over our proposal and made some changes. The most important thing, however, was in our first round of patients. This round we were doing for free, or close to it, in order to build up a bit of a reputation. I had found a couple of people on PHO and mom had gotten in touch with one of the nurses through a friend of hers to offer me as an option to a couple of people at the hospital.

But Mr Wiles was able to bring in a member of the protectorate to review the results, just to make sure that I had checked all my boxes.

I didn't like having the PRT here, but as far as I could tell, they wouldn't be able to cause problems, especially with all the other volunteers for power testing. We were in a dance studio that was willing to rent out the space for the afternoon. We had a few people doing video and I was sitting there in my new costume.

It wasn't my final costume, but I was able to make something that looked okay for this meeting.

But the big thing was my face. Using my version of Panacea's power, I had added a bit more fat and cartilage to various parts of my face and removed a lot from my body, making me look very muscular, and added some glowy proteins to my eyes to make them a bright blue to go with my costume. I didn't need a mask, and that, according to my fashion tinker power was quite good, because the less you could see of a person's face, the scarier they were. Having a fully visible face also made it harder to find me, or at least it did when I could change my face to look different.

I had a loose white coat over my costume, my gloved hands holding the entirely unnecessary clipboard. Walking up to the first in line, one of the people I had selected from PHO.

"You can record this if you want."

He smiled, excitedly telling his friend to hold up the camera as I put my hand on him. Concentrating, I focused on what I could sense with my power.

My filters, now fitted with days of analysing Panacea's database quickly diagnosed the issue, and feeding medical data I got online into my database gave me names. "You have a case of Dupuytren's Contracture, as a result of several small nodules forming in the tissue surrounding the lower joints of your right ring finger and pinky. Your pre-operative posts on PHO have been confirmed, so let's get to business."

Removing the nodules was simple enough, but I also took a moment to trace back the source, filtering my approach through my Tinker power to make sure I got everything. In the end, it only took a little more effort to correct the minor deviance in ECM structure to prevent a resurgence. Beyond that I checked the rest of his body, making sure I caught everything before standing up, "You could be good now."

I smiled as I watched him flex his fingers for a moment before moving onto the next.

It took me a little while, but even as Micheal finished taking videos of his hand to post to PHO, I was wrapping up the last person, the young woman who the PRT brought in who was suffering from Ankylosing Spondylitis.

Was, indeed, I chuckled mentally as my power destroyed the crystaline shards on her bones and moved them to her gut to be expelled later. "You will likely have to do some physical therapy and exercise to get your strength completely back to human norm, but I have corrected the mutated DNA and cleared extant damage. Your bones have been reinforced, but I would recommend calcium supplements in order to allow your skeleton to fully heal."

I was careful to sound as professional as possible, not only because it would make me seem more adult, but also because it was supposed to help my patients. And if I was helping somone, I wasn't going to do a bad job.

"Alright everyone, thank you for coming here, please do keep up with your end of the bargain, my legal representative will follow through for a breach of contract. Have a good day."

I talked to Mr. Wiles for a while as everyone else cleared out. The man was quite excited to see my work, "Good job out there kid, with the other people publicly backing this event and some of the people I've informed of this opportunity, the PRT is going to be forced to fast track the testing. We should expect a response within a couple of weeks, and we need that time anyways to set up a proper office for you."

"Yeah… We're buying that old run-down mall, aren't we?"

"And some of the property around it. Land is cheap here in Brockton, and I was able to negotiate a reasonable loan for Halyon LLC. We will actually be cleaning up one of the houses nearby for now until we have a solid income stream."

I nodded, "That's cool. Umm… Is there anything I can do in that time?"

"Well, while we can't do paid healing, there's nothing stopping you from volunteering."

I paused, "And what about other cape stuff?"

"Well, I've reached out to Brandish surrounding what we talked about last time, as well as researched several cases at the state and federal level. Your defences for any possible legal action would be centred around Self-Defense, Defense of Others and Good Samaritan laws - and any arrests would be a citizens arrest. It's kinda risky though."

"I was reading, and I saw that a lot of independents talk about wearing body cameras."

"I will have to get back to you on that, New Hampshire is an all-party consent state, so you can't record people without their permission. It should be allowable as long as this is outdoors in a public place, but I remember there being some caveats to that. I have some time this evening, so I can get back to you on that, but it might take a minute."

I nodded, "We can be in touch then. I need to figure out some better head protection options before I go out. I'm probably going to go with a helmet at the end of the day, but I would like to look into a few more options first."

For the moment, I had my projection power effectively making a forcefield, which was probably good enough, but I didn't want to tie up one of my powers like that.

The lack of charges spooked me a little, but with them coming back it was looking like creating a dedicated defensive power might be worth it. If nothing else, I was already planning on making protective powers for my family, and this would be good practice.

I was almost up to sixteen charges again, and I think that's going to be enough to make something worthwhile.

That said, if I can make some protective tinker tech that might be good too.

I took a moment to mentally check the time before flying out of the window and weaving through the building to one of the storm drains. I took a minute to change back into some normal clothes before heading home.

Mom was in the kitchen waiting for me, "So, how did it go?"

"Pretty good. Mr Wiles feels that we should hear back from the PRT in a couple of weeks."

I could see mom reaching out to stop me, but it was too late, "You're a cape?"

I slowly turned my head and saw Jenny at the top of the stairs. "Ummm…"

Jenny burst out laughing, "Oh my god! I can't freaking believe it. You're a cape and this is how I find out, because you were talking to mom and didn't notice me."

"Well," I sighed in surrender, "yeah, I'm a cape, but you have to keep it secret. I don't want to end up dealing with the gangs and everythig."

She nodded, "Don't worry bro, I can keep a secret."

"No, Jenny, really you need to keep this a secret." Mom says as she looks Jenny in the eye."

"Don't worry mom." She reassured her, "So, what powers do you have?"

I sighed and started explaining, "... So, yeah, keep this a secret, because I still don't know how long it's going to be before I can protect you from the kind of people who will probably kidnap you to force me to work for them."

She stared at me, befor elooking at mom, "Why don't I have powers like that."

The room froze for a minute before she cracked and we all started laughing.

"But no seriously, I understand." She said, "Um… you're going to be a hero right?"

"Kinda, I'm definitely not joining the Protectorate, but I've made a version of Panacea's power. I've got a lawyer, and I'm going to heal people for money. Once I have enough, I'm going to start a super team."

"How are you going to do that?"

"Well, I can make a power that lets me give the powers I make to other people so, once I had enough powers, I was just going to give them to other people."

She looked at me with die eyes, "Could you give me powers too?"

I blinked, before turning to mom, who was staring at Jenny, "Young lady!"

"Mooom!"

"Look, I can't stop James from getting powers, but at least he's using them responsibly!"

As she yelled at Jenny, I quietly removed tonight's patrol from my to do list.

"So, I started geting charges again today."

Mom looked at me, "Really? How many?"

"I'm back up to sixteen, but I hopefully, I'll keep going a little while longer. I should be able to get some work done on defensive powers soon."

Mom smiled, "See Jenny, James is making sure he's protected before he goes out. What do you expect to happen?"

"Well duh, I need like a costume that could protect me… Hey James, what does your costume look like?"

"Well, My costume looks pretty different, but it's not as protective as I want it to be. I had to kind of cheat to get my tinker powers working, and well, I need more time for them to work properly. Do you want to see a picture?"

She nodded, and I conjured up a picture from the healing this morning. "There's actually a couple threads on PHO, I invited a few people online for the healing I did today to make sure that the Protectorate actually had to get shit done because now there are people who know that Halcyon is going to be healing people and they can't take their sweet time getting around to this. I've even got some big clients that are going to be able to lean on the PRT for me so I should be ready to start healing in like two weeks max."

"And when are you going to be going out and fighting crime and stuff?"

"I dunno? Once I have more charges, probably. There's a couple of changes I want to make for my power first, and I need to build up more of a rep first."

She nodded, and eventually, things calmed down a little. We had lunch and Jenny and I talked about different capes and their powers.

"Oooh, you should copy Glory Girl's strength!"

"Oh, I can already do better."

"Huh?"

"Oh, yeah, I scanned like all of that half of New Wave when I was scanning Panacea, and well, I took a look at Glory Girl's powers. My telekineisis is technically better than hers, since I have range, and if I wanted to, I could dump all of my power to pretty much outclass her. Granted, it would take a while to recover from that, but I could be way stronger than her for like five to ten minutes until I had to recover, but even then, I could still be pretty strong even when I was using less power than I was recharging."

"Oooh, when you have more charges and you can give me powers, could you give me powers like that?"

"I think I shoudn't give you powers that I've literally copied. I mean, my healing power is already too close to Panacea's and I'm doing my best to make it look different by sort of implying that it's got like a Thinker part where I'm actually learning the stuff and that I need to know how to help people, but just flat copying a power is going to get weird."

She rolled her eyes, "Fine. I'll think of something more original."

"Look, mom's never going to let you go out heroing without some sort of brute power, so think about that first."

She frowned and looked at her food, pushing some of the rice around on the plate, "Yeah, yeah."

"James are you sure about this?"

"I'm going to have to make defensive powers for you guys anyways. There's too much of a risk that someone's going to figure out who I am, and I need to protect you."

Mom smiled sadly, "And when you do, She's just going to go out on her own anyways."

"Brute powers are pretty limited, I'm looking at a few options, but there's a lot of capes with powers that kind of just beat most brute powers. Like the Siberean, who hurt Alexandria. I want make sure that you're tough enough to take a hit but also good enough at geting away so that even if something could hurt you, you'll still be safe."

"Yeah, your power's pretty strong. I've seen a lot of people with strong powers, and all of them end up mixed up in some terrible things. People just want that kind of power I guess."

I nodded, "Yeah, I'm hoping to find something that would let me do a danger sense power, or something like that, but a generic danger sense power is pretty expensive, a five or a six at least, and I'm not entirely sure how to optimise it."

Jenny looked up to me, "How would that even work?"

"Yeah, I'm trying to figure it out too. The way I imagine it, the power would like, detect everything in range and kind of figure out how dangerous it is, but it needs a decent range to be able to get most of the actually dangerous things, and there's a bunch of other problems with that approach."

"That seems pretty complex"

"Yeah, even breaking it down a bit, like making a sensor range package, and like a threat analysis package and all of that still easily hits the total for a level five power, and that's without whatever defensive power you ned to keep you safe if you do find anything dangerous."

She nodded, before pausing, "So… um… if you're going to be a hero… Um… mind if I tell you about something?"

I turned to her and raised an eyebrow, "What's up?"

"Well, there's this girl in my class and she's being really badly bullied, and…"

"When school starts maybe. I'll investigate and see what's going on, and try and help out if I can, but I'm not sure if I can."

"Please do? I mean, Taylor is pretty nice, it's just that if I try and help her out, then Emma and Sophia chase me down, and well."

"I understand, as nice as Taylor is, I'm not going to suggest you get yourself in trouble. I'll see what I can do. Can you tell me more about what's going on?"

"Well, I don't know too much, but…" As she spoke, one of my lanes was already online, looking into what I could do wor Jenny.

Figuring out how to deal with bullying was hard, especially with how usless Winslow was. There were gang tags in the hallways, telling a teacher about a girl getting picked on was probably going to do nothing.

As those two lanes plugged away at that problem, I sat back to consider bigger things.

Going out right now was going to make mom worry too much, and even if I did get charges today, I still hadn't nailed down my defensive powerset.

I didn't want to just copy Glory Girl, not when I hadn't checked out Shielder's power first. I already knew that Glory Girl's barrier was really strong, much stronger than her father's. But even looking at the feats online for Glory Girl and the rest of New Wave. There was a lot of differing opinions for how strong the different force-fields New Wave had were.

With the way things were going, I'd probably have to just pretend to have a brute power the first few times I go out, with my Projector until I could tag enough capes with Target to figure out a proper Brute power.

I nodded to Jenny and put my plate in the dishwasher. Absently, I washed my hands and headed up the stairs to get to the gym.

"Um, James?"

"Yes Jenny?"

"If you can change your face like that, does that mean you could change yourself to be muscular too?"

I nodded. "I could, I made myself more muscular in costume this morning."

"Then do you really need to work out?"

I paused, "I actually don't think so."