Ember

It took a while, but eventually, I had the time to work on my powers. I still didn't have enough information to decide on a proper anti-master power, I had come to a decision on a few other powers.

To start with, I was finishing up my Tinker power. Between Uppercrust, Kid Win, Armsmaster and Squealer, I had a solid idea of where I had gone wrong with my initial design. Oddly enough, from what I could tell, it was more or less just in my effector. Converter allowed me to output different kinetic, thermal and electromagnetic energy, but it didn't allow me to do something fundamental to Tinker powers.

Transmute matter.

It should have been obvious early on, but part of the Tinker powers I had at my disposal suggested designs with what I had on hand as tools. It normally took into account the low-level ability for Tinkers to transmute various trace elements and purify materials beyond the capacity of modern industrial processes in order to help them build stuff, or just cheat in the form of minor shaker effects when their transmutation power wasn't up to the task.

Which meant that I needed to fix my Projector to handle those sorts of things.

But I didn't want to get caught off guard like this again, so I ended up spending some time doing some research with my other lanes over the past few days, analysing the contents of my Tinker database to try and figure out what would be required to make everything.

Transmutation and gravity effects, it seemed, as well as certain mechanisms to modify the various fundamental force fields, including what I think is the Higgs field.

But while I was studying this, I remembered my attempts at blocking Kaiser's power, the tricks I used to block his ability to project metal with his power. I had managed to learn a lot about his power when I did that. And while I still couldn't figure out exactly how it worked, some of my theories reminded me of other things I had to take into account as I made new powers, like allowing me to work with dimensional stuff if I ever got a chance to study Haywire's portals.

But as I planned things out, I started thinking of some older powers I wanted to make.

Honestly, the biggest thing to start with should be some mental acceleration. Some way of giving me longer to think and test. It was cheap. So cheap, that I was mainly thinking about making it part of a larger enhancement suite, but I think it might be better to spend an entire charge on it.

Even including the inherent ability to meter its effects on me, I could still think thousands of times faster. Sure, I couldn't really act any faster, since My body still relied on my muscles to move and it took time for my powers to accelerate the matter around me, but I could spend an entire hour making a decision in just a second whenever I wanted.

I did have to optimise it a little. I've discovered a few interesting things about my powers. Optimising them to work with other powers meant that I could actually get a little more out of them. In this case, optimising my powers to work with the lanes of thought my other power gives me, or with the same sort of construct from other powers in the future, I could have the accelerate operate at different rates across different lanes of thought.

Any and all of which could be operating at thirty-six hundred times the speed.

I took a moment to consider the decision, before pulling the trigger. As it took effect, the world froze, and I felt a strange weight in my arms, I could try and move them, but they seemed frozen in place, the movement invisible at this timescale.

I ramped down the acceleration and laid back in bed, relaxing before going back in. Watching the world freeze as I looked out the window.

I chuckled internally, taking a moment to check my email before frowning. My mental computer seemed to have sped up along with me, My power couldn't do anything about the milliseconds it took to look things up on the internet. Even with a twenty millisecond ping time, it would take almost a minute for even a single round trip, and my mail would probably take more than twenty minutes to show up.

But still, it gave me time to think about my other powers. The biggest one I wanted was some sort of danger sense, but every implementation was too expensive. I didn't want to spend a fourth-level charge on it.

But eventually, I did figure out a solution.

Precognition was expensive, but there were ways to make it cheaper. Not cheap by any means, but with the right restrictions, you could get the power down to a level two charge.

It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but I could create a power that would essentially look at the information it contained roughly ten minutes in the future. I couldn't chain it, but I could send information back in roughly ten minutes. A surprising amount of information, oddly enough.

Paired with my other powers, or just the actions of my future self. I could tell if I was going to be injured or otherwise damaged in the future, and maybe even mastered, if I saw anything out of place neurologically in my future snapshot. In fact, I could send enough information back in time to look into the future five minutes from now.

That said it did have its weaknesses. I couldn't tell if there was a danger I couldn't see or otherwise detect with my powers. I couldn't tell if someone was spying for me, or if their powers made it impossible for me to detect them somehow.

That said, I think this would keep me alive at worst. It should give me enough time to react to basically any threat.

I think. Or at least, I couldn't think of a situation that ten minutes of prep, especially with more than enough time to plan anything I needed to do would get me out of.

Especially given some of my other plans.

It would cost a bit, but at the end of the day, two charges, even if it was only ten minutes into the future would give me a massive advantage. Plus, I haven't fought go longer than that. Plus, the power updates, the future I see reflecting actions I choose to make now that I have the information that would have existed ten minutes from now.

I considered the power, and thought about spending the four charges I would need to allow me to see an hour into the future. But honestly? I didn't have the charges to spare for that right now, and this power was potent enough that I wouldn't need to worry about it going to waste even if I decided to make a higher level power later. I mean, just using this power to give Mom or Jenny a danger sense would be enough, but I'm sure I could find plenty of uses for a power that let you see ten minutes into the future.

So, I (tried) to take a breath, and burnt the two charges. As Ten Minute Message settled in, I felt a new sense settle into my mind. Even just laying here, I could see how the future shifted every time I comprehended what I was receiving. I saw as I checked in on Mom and Jenny without so much as moving. I could scan my surroundings simply by intending to explore.

And funnily enough, I could even check my mail, pulling my inbox from five minutes from now so that I could see what I would get.

I could even browse the internet like this freely, looking into the future to when I had received the messages.

It made a really interesting hacking tool since the messages didn't get sent if I didn't end up making that decision down the line, I could just hack into systems without leaving a single trace of my presence in the systems I targeted.

And if I could get somewhere, I could even physically access the place without even leaving a trace.

This is why I began work on my next power.

Studying Brandish, Hookwolf and even Kaiser keyed me into the fact that powers could store matter, not just energy. It was obvious in hindsight, where did Kaiser get the metal he threw around, or did Lung get all the extra mass he used to heal? Or even Genesis's projections.

But there was something important about that to me.

It took me a while to figure out what about this power seemed important until I spotted them on my shelf. It was an old sci-fi movie series I watched with my dad, about this kid who flew spaceships. But the big thing was that they explained their faster-than-light travel as going out of the universe and into this other dimension called hyperspace.

Now, that sort of technology wasn't there in my tinker repositories, but I did manage to figure out something else.

Teleportation powers were generally expensive. Even making short hops within a range of a couple of blocks was at least a tier three power.

The ability to put my body into my power and take it out later was a single charge.

And I could take it out wherever I had a Target.

In effect, I could jury rig teleportation with only two charges, and with an effectively unlimited range to boot. If nothing else, this would mean that I didn't need to spend so much time in the storm drains. That by itself was worth the single charge.

So I watched the Charge burn the strange esoteric shape of the power into my mind, the new void within myself I instinctively knew I could draw myself into and out of. Even at full acceleration, I could easily draw myself into and out of my new little hidey-hole. In myriad futures I saw myself teleporting around the city, a patrol was done in no time flat as I teleported around.

All without even leaving my bed for a fraction of a second.

Still, I had work to do, and while I had already made progress, I still hadn't managed to complete what I started with.

Tinker powers are needed to allow me the ability to reshape matter on a fundamental level. But now that I knew that, I also realised that my current tools were limited. My Sensors, copied as they were from other powers were extremely powerful, detecting energies beyond the capability of modern science.

And possibly beyond the imagination of modern science. Some things were obvious, I managed to figure out what translated to electromagnetic and kinetic energies fairly easily. Figuring out the weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces was much harder. But I was able to do that fairly easily.

It was only after hours of poring over scientific papers that I managed to put two more names to the energies I saw, and even then I wasn't sure.

I'm fairly sure that what I thought was gravity was correct, though learning that gravity wasn't really a force was a little bit of a mind melt for me. Or it kind of wasn't?

But there were others. One… I think one of them is the Higgs field, at least from what I understand of it. But there were others.

The others were the big ones because they implied there were forces beyond my comprehension.

It's not like tinker tech tells me how any of that shit works. I know that some of my stuff can mess with those energy fields, but not what they do in any reasonable manner.

Plus, I found out that Glory Girl's Effector module affects a different set of energy fields. It does fields that the one I'm using doesn't do, and there are some that mine does that hers doesn't.

I mean, I could do a module that does all the fields that mine and her's do, but there were other parahumans. And as far as I can tell, none of the powers can make sense of what happened when I inductively heated Kaiser's steel.

I mean, I know it affects his powers, if not much, at least enough to break Kaiser's concentration for a moment. But I've examined the information Sensor was pumping into my brain and I can't make any sense of what was happening with his power when I did that.

I can clearly recall the backflow of power, inducted into his power somehow. I could see the effects, but I couldn't figure out how I was reaching his power.

There were forces, it seemed that were acting beyond the sensors I had at my disposal. I needed to be able to address this.

And while what I had was a decent starting point adding more as I needed it was something that would keep tying up charges in the long term.

In the end, there was only so much I could do about the situation. At two charges, I could create an upgraded version of my sensor that could detect everything my current version could, glory girl's could and while it was a bit of a hack, I could throw an extra charge at it to allow it to detect the energies that powers used to connect to this world. Not only in terms of Kaiser's metal generation, but also stuff like Lung's regeneration or New Wave's energy, or even the connections that gave Amy the information her power was receiving.

Including myself in the power made it much more expensive, unfortunately. A ninth-level charge to get more insight into my power than what I have.

But Frankly, Sensor 2.0 was already starting to be worth it. Even if I couldn't quite make sense of it, I could sense strange fluctuations in the energy fields around us. Including sweeps of energy that passed over the city.

Thinkers, looking at this city. I think. Since the only other thing I could match it to was the energies that Panacea scanned her patients with.

It seemed like there was more than one of them active, but I wasn't sure - this was all pretty new to me.

But now it came time for the other part of the Tinker package.

A Tinker package was the sort of thing that I would keep using. With the way I had set mine up, upgrading would be simple.

So, even if I was worried about spending too much. This… I think this is a decent investment.

I started with manipulation, with a third-level charge going into a better effector for my tinkering needs, capable of interacting with anything I could sense using Sensor 2.0.

Then was absorption. Making matter was too expensive at basically any scale, but absorbing it was relatively cheap, and because of mass-energy equivalency, I was able to finagle a power that would let me absorb most things that could hurt me. It still wasn't cheap, but since I did want it to be able to act as a defence, the eight charges of a forth level charge were worth it.

Painful, but worth it. The third level charge for the matter reserve that would store the incoming matter as differentiated masses of subatomic particles was only a little better.

Still, there was one last thing left to make, and even if I was no longer able to make a seventh-level power, it was a good investment.

I have to keep telling myself that. I'll get more charges, and I can do higher-level powers like that later. But tinker powers are worth it.

So, I steeled myself and put the last six charges. Two went into a transmutation power, to allow me to create more exotic particles if I needed them. Slow, in comparison to just putting some more matter in my reserves, but invaluable for some of my other projects.

The last four went into a power capable of quickly and efficiently using the collection of matter at my disposal to simply print out whatever I wanted to make.

The powers flared into being, intricate traceries joining the array behind me.

I looked out into the distance, dropping a target over the city. Two more hops through my Eye and I had a Target in my office.

Dropping out of mental acceleration, I headed out, disappearing into the nearby woods for the last time.

As soon as I reached that cistern with my outfit, I took a moment to change and then teleported to my office, settling down at my desk as I made plans for the future.

I could already see significant improvements to Cord. The best versions would have to be ones that I made myself, making use of transmuted elements that would be far too hard to get a hold of normally, but there were versions that I could mass produce, making use of the exotic elements during production only.

But even outside of Cord, I had other options. The composite I used for the armour was tough, but with access to subatomic manipulation, I could make far better composites.

In fact…

I let my powers play over my costume, the mesh of super-durable proteins and keratinoids torn apart into subatomic particles before coming back out the other side, woven into a complex mesh of crystals, polymers and exotic matter.

A little extra mass, absorbed from some spare biomatter I kept in the labs here meant that I could build a few extra things. A couple of extra hardpoints allowed me to anchor shield generators, sensor arrays and perhaps most importantly for me, a cloaking field generator.

It meant that I could finally move around without being seen if I ever needed to move subtly, though my teleportation would work well enough for the time being.