It took four days for my rogue's license to arrive, and I didn't spend them idly.

Firstly, Dad didn't let me slack off on school work as he had during the 'holidays'. It didn't take up a massive amount of time or even effort, really, so I just got on with it. The sciences - the mathematical parts at least - were simplicity itself and the conceptual parts weren't much harder. Humanities were trickier, but being able to just get the concepts and remember the names the first time around made them easier too.

The real work was getting the business ready.

There were so many things that had to be done. Forms had to be filled out and sent to City Hall, a website built and wordings decided upon. Prices had to be drawn up for the different things I was intending to offer, a task which on its own ate up the better part of a day in research, comparisons with other rogues and the closest normal business analogues I could find, as well as checking everything against the guidelines the NEPEA-5 and the PRT set for rogues.

I spent most of the four days working on setting up my business, Aurum Solutions, and by the end of it I had a far greater respect for Dad's job than I had beforehand. He helped in the evenings, pointing out the mistakes I made and double-checking my workings as well as testing out the website, which I was hosting off of Dad's computer. I just left the glow in it constantly now, as there didn't seem to be any problems.

The only real sticking point I had was that of advertising. I wouldn't get far just advertising on free outlets like the Parahumans Online forums, but neither Dad or I had the spare funds to pay for an ad campaign. I suggested just going out in costume, taking advantage of the Bay's cape culture for publicity, but Dad shot me down. "It's too risky," he said, "with the gangs out there." I agreed. In the end, I resigned myself to a slow startup. Once I had some money I could pay for online advertising, which would hopefully let me get started on physical advertising.

The license arrived on Thursday afternoon, and I launched the website only an hour after I got it, along with posting my advertisement thread on PHO and sending off my first three programs - a virus sweeper, a web browser and a simple video game I'd whipped up - off to the PRT for their review. I kept the old thread up, leaving the stuff I'd already made free for download, but I couldn't use it to link to the new one. The programs I'd put up weren't tinkertech so I wasn't breaking a law, but I doubted the PRT would see it that way. No need to invite unneeded trouble.

The new thread didn't take long to pick up steam. The cape geeks came first, speculating on the exact nature of my powers from the information I included on my website. Some of the guesses were quite close while others were just wrong, hilarious or some combination of the two. My personal favourite was that I was actually an AI just pretending to be a cape, although there were plenty crazier ones. Following the cape geeks came the capes themselves, one by one. Glory Girl made a virtual appearance, as did Panacea and Parian, who congratulated me on getting set up properly.

I made a note to myself to go ask her about my costume sometime. It had slipped my mind in the excitement of telling Dad, the registration and getting everything in shape.

It took almost a day for the first person to actually apply for my services; a small tech firm in the southern part of the Bay. The work on my end consisted of catching a bus down there in the morning, enhancing a couple of computers and heading home, then returning in the evening to take back the glow and get paid and I went home four hundred dollars richer for about 20 minutes' work on my part. The best part of it all was that the manager wrote up a review on my website - with only a polite request on my part - and that served to get the ball rolling. I wasn't doing much to help anyone else yet, but it was a start. Over the following week, I got a few more job offers. All of them were for my enhancing abilities rather than anything else, but they were easy and they paid.

The PRT eventually got back to me over the programs, greenlighting the game and the browser. They wouldn't let me sell the virus sweeper to the public, however, on grounds of my having an 'advantaged position in that market' because of my abilities. They did, however, offer to buy copies themselves for a reduced price. It was more than a little annoying, but that was the law. It wasn't like developing it cost me much, and every cent counted. Their rate wasn't bad, anyway, and I'd be helping the heroes. They did attach a note on the game, though, that no-one had been able to make it past the first level, and that I should maybe tone down the difficulty a bit.

What I was really interested in, though, was a message that came alongside the approvals: a request from Armsmaster - Armsmaster! - to arrange a time for me to come over to the Rig again to test whether my enhancement power worked on tinkertech. Even more than that, he offered to pay my consultant's fee if for me to come over if I would cooperate with him in tinkering. I knew from my research that tinkers could often get inspiration from each other, and even if I wasn't really a tinker, I was sure that if nothing else I could get some ideas from watching him work.

Plus, he was Armsmaster. A hero! If I could help him help someone else, then that was almost as good as me doing it myself.

In the end I sent a message back and a date was set two weeks from now, as apparently his schedule was very full. I was looking forward to it so much, and Dad didn't hesitate to tease me over that.

He even brought up the Armsmaster-brand underwear, the traitor.

XxXxX

I woke up quickly, going from sleep to wakefulness in a moment, as I had for the last month. I didn't miss the haze of waking up, although I did kind of miss the way I could sort of loll in bed peacefully. Now I had the whisper of computers and the internet in the back of my head, and even if it wasn't distracting it was the kind of thing that you focus on when it's quiet and you're not doing anything else. My dreams had gotten pretty weird since I'd started leaving the glow in computers while I slept.

I groaned and got up, pulling on my clothes. It was a Saturday, and although I didn't have any jobs today I did want to get on with a couple of my own projects. I'd modified a CAD program a while ago so I could easily manifest designs from it in my glow - a tricky combination of software architecture and mental gymnastics, as I had to trick the glow into thinking that the screen it was displaying was actually in the shape of my model - and I had started playing around with some robotics, along with the programming to go with the designs. I had an idea that maybe I could make some kind of industrial exoskeleton to help the Dockworkers, both directly and by lending them the element of mystique and excitement that came with being associated with capes. Plus, the building of the exoskeletons, if I could get them to work, would itself provide jobs. I needed to try and make the game easier, too, if I wanted to sell it.

Maybe I can leave it as it is, but add easier settings?

I crept downstairs, making sure not to wake Dad up. It was only 6 in the morning, after all, and he deserved to sleep in on a Saturday with how hard he worked. Breakfast was a sausage sandwich whose ingredients I had bought myself with my own earned money, an oddly thrilling experience. After I'd finished and washed up the plate, I slunk into the study and woke up the computer with a flex of will, opening up my official email. The latest entry immediately caught my eye.

Offer of employment [From: dschafer .com]

I blinked, then when the email failed to vanish I tried to contain my excitement. Medhall was one of the biggest employers in the Bay. If I got an endorsement them, it would mean that I could move up a good few pegs on the economic scale. Good reviews from single-office businesses were on thing, one from Medhall was quite another. I opened the email.

To Ms. Aurum

We at Medhall would like to employ you as a consultant to the cyber-security team here at our head office, as your website explains that your parahuman abilities allow you special insight into computer systems. We would also like to hire you for your abilities to enhance our mainframe on a permanent basis, if such is possible.

I await your response with hope.

Yours

Dominick Schafer

Dominick Schafer

Head of Information Technology and Computer Systems, Medhall Corporation

It was everything I had hoped for and more. I almost replied then and there, but then I thought better of it. I'd show Dad when he woke up and see what he thought. He'd been in the business of dealing with people like this for far longer than me.

I closed the email and got to work on working the arrangement of the servos and miniature hydraulics for the exoskeleton's arms. I'd found half a dozen or so books and papers on the idea of powered armour, one even written by Dragon herself, and although most of them dealt more with what tinkertech people had been able to study than mundane technology or discussed the odd fact that so many tinkers built powered armour of one form or another, there was still plenty there I could use.

The issue I had with tinkertech was that all the designs and schematics I'd managed to get a hold of had holes in them. With most technology, provided I knew the basic principles I could string them together and puzzle out the function. With tinkertech I got a bit of the way, then there was a whole section just missing, then it picked up again. Way back in the 90s, Hero had released schematics for one of his older laser pistols in the hope that someone else could figure out how it worked. Looking at it, I could see the trigger mechanism and how that connected to the ruby flashtube, and then how the laser which emerged was focused and modulated through a set of lenses as well as how the flashtube was connected to the power source (which was left off of the schematics). The laser that emerged from the flashtube, though, was far too powerful. Despite the tube itself being very good, better than any normal lasers of its size at the time, its casing should have melted to slag before it got through the quasi-transparent mirror at the end. The lenses' focus was all wrong, too. If the numbers were right they should have scattered the laser to the point that it was more like a flashlight than a beam capable of boiling water. Of all the theories that people had come up with with regards to tinkertech, the one I liked best was the so-called 'multiple powers conduit theory' or MPCT, which suggested that tinker powers were in fact many very specific powers which worked unconsciously in conjunction with the technology to create its effect.

All of which was to say that although I couldn't just copy the designs that tinkers used for their power armour, there were useful bits in there that I could use. What little information Dragon had released on some of her oldest suits, ones she didn't use anymore and hadn't for years, had some particularly nice piston arrangements, very artful.

Dragon seemed to have a way of arranging things so that they could do many things at once, or so they could swap from one job to another fairly easily. Rigger's exoskeletons, by contrast, were brutally blunt objects, but had a kind of sensible practicality to them that I could appreciate: they were the work of someone who chose a job and made something to do that job. I was going for somewhere in the middle. My exoskeletons didn't need the versatility that Dragon's villain-fighting suits did, but I wanted them to be more widely applicable than Rigger's single-purpose designs.

I had an idea that maybe one day I could make something to help the PRT or police deal with capes themselves, but that was far off. For now, I was fiddling with the upper arm, trying to work out an arrangement which would work with human musculature and which could tolerate all the poses you could put an arm in while still providing a useful level of enhancement. I lost myself in the problem, tweaking a variable, running a simulation, taking the results and applying the results over and over again, creeping towards functionality. At the moment, I was pretty sure that if anyone but me or a brute tried to actually use the thing, it would probably snap most of the bones in their arms.

A hand on my shoulder startled me out of my work. I looked up to see Dad smiling softly down at me.

"Working early?"

"Nope," I replied, popping the P cheekily. "You're just late." I remembered the email. "Oh, I got this."

I formed a screen and swiped it up to anchor to his hand, then brought up the email. He read through it, and it was like a sun rose behind his eyes. He smiled, and this time it was blinding in its pride.

"You're going up in the world, Taylor."