1.3
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Well, my first runner is done and I think I'm ready to go out on the town tonight. I thought about using myself as bait by hanging around alley entrances, but that wouldn't help any of the people that are already in trouble, it would just get some of the creeps off the street. I ended up deciding to trail behind my runner a ways to try to cover a bit more ground and be ready to step in if there were any problems.

I didn't really feel the need to wear a costume since I was planning on only getting involved with my runner and actually making a costume would delay my outing by several days. I had a few ideas on the costume front, but I hadn't actually settled on anything concrete. I could go the minimalist route and grow some finely scaled, close fitting "clothes" with some basic armor and stealth necessities, or I could go for the full coverage bio-armor that included augmented muscles and built in weapons. I guess it will depend on what I feel I need once I've been out a few times.

I stepped out into the clear night. It was pretty still out, so I would be able to hear any potential trouble from blocks away. Of course, the darkness was no barrier to my eyes; my main body could see as though it were noon, and even though the runner had it's nictitating membranes closed so that it would be totally invisible instead of a floating pair of eyes, it could see even better than my human body, since it was not limited to human looking eyes.

Walking around with what effectively amounted to an invisible 400 pound guard dog was an amazing confidence boost. Even though I knew that my main body was functionally immune to small arms fire, I would still have felt hesitant to go walking around alone at night just due to sheer ingrained habit. The senses available as the runner were a rush; you would think that I would be used to it, since my planter had been walking around the city for more than two weeks now, but it hung out on the edge of my range so often it was easy to think of it as being a separate entity to me. The runner on the other hand was an obvious extension of myself, integrated to the point that when it was looking at a poster for a lost pet, my main body had no trouble reading off what it said even when "I" couldn't see it. I didn't have to focus on looking through my runner's eyes or anything, it just felt like I had two sets of eyes that happen to be separated by a larger distance than usual.

I headed slightly deeper in to the docks, towards the area I knew was favourited by Merchant muggers and drug dealers. Just because I hadn't been in the area much myself didn't mean that I didn't have intel on the area; my synapse nodes only had basic senses, but I had a lot of them. It was amazing what you could learn from overhearing a couple of weeks worth of conversations from half a city of area. I probably only caught one in ten conversations because the senses on the nodes were so poor, but that was plenty to give a fairly real time map of crime in a city; after all, I only caught some of the talking, but I caught pretty much all of the gunshots.

With my hearing, it ended up taking less than 30 minutes to find a mugging in process. Now I just had to decide how to ruin a mugger's day.

"Hey, I said give me your wallet!" yelled the sunken eyed man, waving a knife in the direction of a cowering man in jogging clothes.

"I d-d-don't h-have my wallet on me though," stuttered the jogger.

I moved the runner towards the increasingly agitated mugger, deciding to just tackle him if it looked like he was going to use the knife. Neither man noticed my approach, since I had camouflage engaged and I wasn't making any noise.

"Bullshit! I'll stab you if you don't hand it over,"

"N-n-o really, please, I didn't bring it," sobbed the young man.

I had seen enough. I was close enough that I could reach out and touch the junkie with the runner, so I didn't try anything fancy; the next time he swung the knife in my general direction, I just plucked it out of his hands with an firm three fingered grip on the flat of the blade.

I hadn't realized that my reaction times were so much better than a baseline human's. It was like he held the knife out for me, and I even had plenty of time to decide how to grab the blade safely before closing my claw gently around it.

"What the fuck!" yelled the merchant; his eyes going wide and his pupils dilating even more as his knife seemingly got yanked out of his hands by thin air.

The jogger stood frozen in fear, wide eyed at the floating knife. I was going to tell him to just run for it before I realized that my runner didn't have a human compatible voice box. Oops. For that matter, I didn't really have a way to restrain the mugger safely or call the police and let them know that I even had a mugger ready to pick up. I suppose I could just sit on him with my runner, I was upwards of 400 pounds after all, but I would still have to go find a payphone with my human body to call the police and wait for them to arrive.

I ended up just settling for giving the jogger a slight nudge to get him moving and knocking the mugger around a bit with the invisible runner to dissuade him from mugging again in the future.

"Ahhhh! Who the fuck is there, show yourself."

Let's see, a voice box wouldn't be a problem, a bird type syrinx would be much more efficient than a human larynx at producing loud sounds if I wanted them, and could produce a better range of sounds anyway.

"What the fuck do you want with me you fucker!"

Oooh, I bet I could even work out a pretty good echolocation system using ultrasonic frequencies for high fidelity images and infasonic frequencies for matter penetrating sonar to "see" movement and large structures through walls and underground.

"I-I-I'm a member of the Merchants, you better stop messing with me or I'll get some guys to fuck you up."

Hmmm. What to do about safely containing gang members though. I could try a glue or expanding foam like the PRT use. Nah, needs too much volume to do anything useful, I'd need to design a creature from the ground up to do that properly. How about a launched net? Yeah, fire a compressed ball of woven carbon nano-stuctues soaked in a quick drying sticky epoxy so you can't just fling the thing off, and it will harden into an extremely tough, semi-rigid, shear thickening tack with ridiculous tensile strength to restrain them without injury and without sticking cops to the gangers they're trying to arrest. That could work.

"Y-you hear me? We'll kill you, s-s-s-shit head"

Well, I have officially got tired of this guy ranting. I figure I'll give him a good scare then let him run away. If he wants to mug again, that's on him. I grabbed the ex-mugger by the ankle and dragged him down the alley a ways, just enough to give him a bit of road rash to remember me by. And wow, he's got a set of lungs on him. As soon as I let go, he went off screaming into the night.

I decided to head back to my base to start upgrading my runner. Theoretically I could modify it in the same way I modified myself, simply by parsing the genetics, then releasing the change. Two reasons I didn't do that though. One: it wasn't very energy efficient, even a small change like the voice box would be more energy intensive than necessary. Two: it would take longer, the smaller change would probably take a day or two, but a new bio-weapon, especially an external one like the net launcher was going to be, would take more like a week. If I grew the additions at my base, then implanted them into my existing runner, I was pretty sure I could finish the changes tonight.

The voice box was easy, I already had one growing by the time I returned to the base. It would be ready to implant in a few hours. The net launcher was going to take some design work. I wanted a compacted size about as large as a golf ball, and an expanded size of two or three meters diameter.

The woven carbon nano-structure was actually the easy part, I had encyclopedias worth of carbon chemistry knowledge in my head. I just had to pick the right mix of flexibility, strength, and expansion factor. Far stronger than spider silk, while remaining just as flexible, and having a definite maximum stretch range, beyond which it would act more like steel cable, stretching almost nothing at all. The harder part was coming up with a biological epoxy with the characteristics I wanted. It would need to be incredibly sticky for the first 30 seconds or so, then dry on to the surface so that it was very difficult to remove, but no longer sticky. I wanted it to be very flexible when wet, and very stiff (but not brittle) when hardened, with a tendency to resist movement by becoming more rigid the faster it was flexed. Ideally this would give me nets that were murder to escape, while preventing the captive from slicing themselves to ribbons on taught carbon nano-tubes.

The launcher itself was simple enough, I just re-purposed one of the many templates for a muscled tube projectile launcher. It could launch a golf ball hard enough to bruise, but not enough to kill, so hopefully even failed shots couldn't cause serious harm. I even picked a design that would accommodate multiple sizes of projectile by unhinging like a snake's mouth, so that I could launch a much larger net if desired. It would be easy to have the launcher store half a dozen man sized nets and one vehicle sized net the size of a baseball, ready to launch, and it could produce it's own ammunition if given nutrients from the host organism.

After a short incubation and some simple neuromuscular, vascular, and skeletal grafts to the left arm of my runner, the Pringles can sized net launcher was ready to go. I suppose that most people would get creeped out by operating on something that was clearly awake and aware of the procedure, but pain was basically optional for any of my bodies and it was handy to have the "patient" move it's muscles and joints at just the right times to line pieces up. My healing rate was so high that grafting a new weapon on to my runner's arm consisted of holding the pieces in place for a couple of seconds while applying pressure, then waiting for the graft to settle the final connections at the cellular level over a couple of minutes.

It was getting close enough to morning that I should probably head home. Since my runner didn't need sleep either, I figured I could start patrolling the edge of the boardwalk for creeps today. It would be kind of cool to stop by the PRT headquarters to see if they could detect my runner at all, since it only used the light spectrum camouflage.

Running back to the house was a joy; since there was no-one around, I didn't mind pouring on the speed and blazing a trail faster than any Olympic athlete could manage. When I started getting closer to the house I heard dad moving around already. That was pretty unusual at this time in the morning, I wonder what woke him up?

Since I could tell he was in the kitchen when I was walking up I called out to him as I came inside. "Hey dad. What are you doing up already?"

"Taylor, where have you been," he demanded.

I vacillated between coming clean and making something up. In the end it was probably a combination of his worry, my good mood, and the fact that my former personal issues just felt so petty these days that caused me to speak the truth.

"I've been out testing my powers. Don't worry, I was perfectly safe, I'm basically bulletproof these days."

Stunned silence.

Perhaps that was a bit blunt for breaking it to him the first time.

"Uhhhhm. Taylor. Kiddo, when did you get powers?"

"In the locker, a couple of weeks ago now."

"Well. I'm not entirely sure what to say about that," said dad; still looking a bit like I'd clubbed him over the head.

I figured I'd elaborate to speed up the conversation a bit. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before now, but it just didn't occur to me. I was too focused on planning how to use my power, since I didn't get anything fancy and direct like laser beams or flight."

"So, uh, you're bulletproof now? That's what you got?"

"Well, not exactly. I got a huge amount of information about biology and control over my own body, so I made myself bulletproof. Do you know what tinkers are? Well I'm a bio-tinker now."

"Wait, isn't that what Bonesaw of the Slaughterhouse 9 is," asked dad with a dawning look of horror. His hands going white from his fists clenching.

"Exactly, which is why I wanted to establish myself as a Hero before approaching the PRT. I don't want them freaking out and banning me from doing anything useful."

"Well, I can tell you've put a lot of thought in to this; and you really are bulletproof now?"

I could tell he was hoping for reassurances on my safety when going out, so I didn't have any problem spilling my secrets a little.

"Yeah. Sub-dermal graphene reinforcement means my skin is now way stronger than a bulletproof vest. That plus my vastly increased muscle density and cross-fiber reinforcements mean that I can basically just ignore small arms fire now."

I could see that the idea that I had powers was finally sinking in for him. He sort of slumped in to a kitchen chair.

"So is that why you've been so much happier going to school these days kiddo?"

"Yeah. All the petty crap they try to bother me with these days just slides right off my skin. It's actually pretty funny how frustrated they're getting because of it all."

"They're still bothering you, even after the school promised," he cut himself off, visibly taking a calming breath.

"Don't worry about it dad, it honestly doesn't bother me any more. It's more amusing watching them work themselves up over than anything else."

He looked up at me, a serious expression on his face. "Well, if you're sure. I suppose I don't have any business sticking my nose in it if you're moving past it."

"Thanks dad. And besides, I'll probably get moved over to Acadia when I join the Wards, since they supposedly send all the Wards there anyway."

I headed over to the fridge and took out some orange juice.

"I think I'll take a shower, then get ready for school."

"Yeah sure, I need to get ready for work anyway, I got called in because one of the warehouses had a minor bang because some idiot decided to try to use a cutting torch on a nearly empty propane tank. I need to make sure the warehouse is still safe and no one got hurt worse than burnt eyebrows and burst eardrums. I'll get back to you about your situation once I've had a while to think about it."

"See you later dad."

"See you later kiddo. Oh, and Taylor, I'm glad you're feeling better, whatever the reason is."