I face-palmed when we watched the video of my interview/introduction later while the other wards laughed. I got up on the podium, actually standing up on top of it instead of standing on the stool behind it. Stared at everyone in the crowd without blinking for a solid, silent minute before leaning over into the microphone clawing the air and saying.
"HHE HHHHEEEII! I'm cute and FLUFFY!"
Before going silent again, while still holding the "clawing-the-air" pose for another minute. The photographers started taking pictures and a lower hand went down and tore off a chunk of the podium, the photographers quickly stopped flashing me and then the reporter asked his question. I shook one person's hand and then wouldn't let him go until he mentioned it and then bolted, running straight through a wall.
Ok, it was pretty funny.
The PRT van is now officially "mine" so long as I get a drivers license to use it. If they tried to repair the van the cost of the repairs exceed the value of the van itself. Technically that means I totaled the vehicle, even though I didn't hit, scratch or ding anything and the van runs just fine. It's just that no one else can drive it because I used the security gate inside of it as new pieces of metal to extend the pedals upwards and create a new me-sized seat in it, tearing out the old one and wrapping the metal around the seat pedestal.
I'm going to have it painted red with flames on the side. Shame that I'm not planning on keeping it for too long, I've got a spaceship design to work on.
A day later and the PR event is now a meme online with a still shot from the video of me clawing the air. It has the "I'm cute and fluffy" caption under it. Also, a photograph of me going through the wall is the "NOPE" meme.
That didn't stop me from using the cute and fluffy one as my profile picture on PHO, though. I can laugh at myself.
Someone posted the entire original introduction-failure video online, it apparently went up just hours after the interview and it has a disturbingly large amount of views. Clockblocker showed me where it was on the youtube like video service.
Ending up doing a one-on-one interview later with another reporter, which became the official introduction video. Sadly, while preparing for the interview, I also discovered that alcohol had no effect on me.
Yay, jetpack number two and number three are done. One to Kid Win for his assistance and the other for PRT testers to use, I'm currently not allowed to use my own jetpack until it goes through testing. Which sucks, but the good news is that everything I produce is now "high priority" and usually comes back within a day or so. Later that same tester-jetpack will be shipped out as the mass production example and tear-down. The jet packs are significantly more expensive to build then the guns, several thousand dollars worth of aviation grade aluminum and titanium alloys machined to tight tolerances on the CNC machine, High temp valves, tiny Hydraulic cylinders and stabilizing electronics and gyros are all crammed into it.
Still mass producible, just expensive from a materials, precision machining and time standpoint.
Shame, I'm running low on things I can build from the federation schematics, I think the next one I'll build is going to be the RPG-like cannons which can level buildings in a single shot.
Bet they're going to like that.
High powered shoulder mounted laser cannons for everyone! Mwahaha!
With luck, they might even scratch an endbringer so that normal people can feel like they are helping too.
I also finally got my own lab chocked full of shiny new machines, even a bunch of Tinkertech building equipment and more mundane things like CNC machines, pick and place machines, solder baths, 3D metal printers, lithography equipment.
Shiny shiny new tinkertech computers and a TV with huge screens line one wall.
Weee!
I even purchased a set of singing tesla coils to play music through, I have it set to play the beginning of the imperial march when someone walks through the door.
The best part, the furniture is all sized to me including a bathroom, shower and a new bedroom and a small kitchenette in the corner. It's basically set up to be like Armsmaster's lab/room.
It's almost like they want me to stay inside for some reason, hah.
"So the cute and fluffy ward wants to look over some of my things does he?" said the skinner armored one, Leet in some generic power-armor of course.
Contacting the criminal duo was easy, I had an official PHO account and they had verified PHO accounts. A quick message about contacting them offline got me a phone number and I just... "borrowed" a PRT officers cell phone.
"Yes, I think I might be able to.. fix other tinkers works or copy them." I could tell that interested him.
"Thattt'sss fairly promising, but what do we get out of this?"
"I figured, if that I am able to produce working versions of your personal shield. I would happily repay you with two working models of what I make."
"Three"
"No, that's unreasonable. There's two of you so I understand the need for two of them. If you want spares we can work out some other deal later on. Sneaking out two devices and covering up the materials used is going to be difficult as is. All the materials are coming out of my tinker budget anyways." Which at this point was positively huge and I'm pretty sure was now bigger than Armsmaster's budget.. for the past several years combined. The pistols and rifles were already in mass production and jetpacks were apparently right behind them, I received a significant portion of the profit from each tinkertech device sold. I also had a bank account that was quickly swelling up.
I wouldn't be surprised if Alexandria and the Number Man were involved and were intentionally swelling my PRT-budget to see what else I could come up with for the PRT, Protectorate, and Cauldron.
"What ab-"
"Look, you're taking no risks here and spending no money, your stuff is already broken. I'm not even sure if I can make copies of broken things yet. I'm the one who's taking all of the risks, spending the time and effort and paying for materials. I just want to try the shields first and maybe some medical tinker things if you have any of that. Even if I get caught I don't think anyone's going to complain too much about defensive tinker gear."
Leet signed, "Alright, but you need to appear on our show sometime."
"Fine, I am a Ward though so nothing that might get me into too much trouble. This deal is just for the shields, future things will get different terms if this works out."
They really liked the mass-producible shoulder mounted laser cannons. I was also promptly banned from using them unless it was an emergency. I admit I was having an awful lot of fun with it while flying around in my jetpack and blowing things up in the ship graveyard for the demonstration and may have been laughing maniacally while blowing up the ships. I went ahead and switched over to the shield project after making a few of the shoulder mounted cannons.
I wanted the Leet-shield for several reasons, first it's defensive technology. Even if I got caught with it and someone recognized it as Leets no-one's going to put up a big stink about it. It's technology the PRT already had, though on a smaller scale than the base-sized shields. Finally, it's technology I already had, though it was sized for the large federation ships and I couldn't produce it. I wanted to find out what happens specifically if I tried to push the Leet-tech shield and the federation shield tech together.
Leet didn't have any written schematics for the broken shield generator but I found that it was fairly easy to pick up a mental schematic of the device by disassembling it, picking up Personal shields. I pushed it into the federation-tech ship-sized shields. Interestingly enough with only a little bit of resistance it combined to form a generalized "Shields" tech, leaving a copy of the original federation-shield tech alone.
With my new sudden understanding of Shield-tech It was interesting to see the parts which looked like they were intentionally sabotaged in Leet's personal shield, a few circuits that couldn't handle the loads they were carrying, a few that put out higher voltages than what was required. The most dangerous part was that the shield emitters themselves were oversized and misaligned which created self-destructive overlapping fields, each usage put an increasing strain on the device as the emitters interfered with each other and damaged themselves every time they were used.
Looking deeper into "Shields" it now had a split-tech appearance where the larger purely-federation tech shields could still be mass produced using it (if I had the nonexistent materials and manufacturing capacity that is). The smaller shields which relied on Leet's version was however still all locked up with the shard-induced DRM.
The weird part was that I could also produce the larger federation-ship sized shields using Leet's DRM locked parts. As in, I could build it today with the materials I had in the lab. The DRM on the hybrid tech looked... thinner, it seemed to be hiding less of the actual mechanics of the shield and seemed to be borrowing the unlocked and unshielded portions of the federation tech whenever possible.
So starting with the larger hybrid version I shrank that down into a personal shield. It worked, It was still locked up by the DRM but... I think I just greatly improved the reliability and significantly reduced the maintenance issues.
My my, It seems I stumbled upon something, the shards were probably adding in additional maintenance issues just to make tinkers less effective.
I mentally "Poked" the tinker-DRM to try and tear it off of the smaller hybrid schematics and sighed as it stayed stubbornly latched on, hiding the actual method that the shield effect is produced as it simply whispered instructions to follow instead. Oh well, this will be the first bit of actual tinker-tech I'm going to produce then.
I quickly put the now non-sabotaged, hybrid, personal shield down on paper before heading over to Armsmaster's lab to see if he could improve it. The shield unit was originally the size of a small paperback book, it'd be nice if he could shrink it down a bit.
Of course I didn't expect him to drag me off into an interrogation room.
"What does Bliznak mean?"
"Bliznak?"
"Bliznak"
"What do you mean? Bliznak is bliznak."
"Describe it"
"Uhh...ok, Bliznak comes out of the rear end, people use it for fertilizer, it stinks..?"
"You are describing fecal matter then?"
"Uh.. yeah"
"Say feces."
"Umm... Bliznak."
"say crap"
"Bliznak"
"I see, you must be unaware that you are not speaking English for some words."
"What?"
"Yes, you are saying B-L-I-Z-N-A-K, not shit or crap or feces."
"I am?"
"Yes, now what does Questa mean to you, define it."
"Umm.. bad word.. unmake something .. No.. mating!... no... it's supposed to be a foul word, the worst. If I'm not speaking english.. then it's like the F-word, but.. the meaning is different I think. I think I might use it for both…"
"Toobaga?"
"Umm.. opposite of smart."
"Alright, now how about something more complex. Yur Porma Dissy"
"Wha.. what did you say?'
"Yur Porma Dissy"
"Meega Nala Questa!"
"Six-Two-Six, what are you.. put the conference table down!"
A loud thud echoes around the room
"No..! Put me down Six-Two-Six!"
Muffled sounds of fighting and things breaking start up.
The director shut off the recording and rubbed her temples, "You two idiots leveled that room, the tables, the chairs, the walls, the CEILING!" she rounded on the adult first. His armored body dinged up, scratched and dented in several places and an imprint of a small pawlike hand was bent into the armored boot.
"Armsmaster, I told you to investigate the language. Try to find out what language on your own, not interrogate him about it!"
Armaster frowned, the lower half of his face showing under the cracked half-face faceplate and replied, "My research on the language brought up nothing, I even requested help from Dragon who was also found nothing. Directly asking him about the language was the fastest and most likely way of getting some information."
"I don't care, I wanted you to do it quietly. It was a low priority! " spat the director before rounding on the smaller blue dog-like thing.
"Goddamn, it Six-Two-Six! YOU and your overreaction to his question were unwarranted. I expect better from you! I'm taking the repairs out of your pay!" she said while slamming her hands down on her desk making the blue furred parahuman jump slightly.
Six-Two-Six pointed at the taller armored man with two hands "He said..."
"Grow up! It should have been obvious that he was asking about what it meant! Just because someone calls you a bad name or something does not mean you get to throw them through a fucking wall!" with her face now red the director sucked in a bit of breath to calm herself, her color returning after a few seconds.
"Six-Two-Six you're suspended for two weeks. Now, get the Hell out of my office and go to your Goddamn room!" The director's voice rising throughout until she was screaming at the end and red-faced once more.
The dog like parahuman nearly jumped out of his seat and hurried out of the office.
They both waited in silence for a minute or two before Armsmaster nodded after checking his display.
The director continued. "Don't worry, nothing about this will be tarnishing your record. Just had to pass a little blame to you verbally to make it seem like a lesser issue overall. Yelling and screaming is cheap, word from up high is to keep him happy, keep him tinkering."
She tapped on her desk with a few fingers "Otherwise good job on getting some of the language down. The Little bastard has apparently been running around cursing at everyone the whole time."
Wait, did she just sentence me to two weeks of no patrols in my lab?
Should... should I destroy more things?