August 14th, 2005, somewhere in Texas
Honestly, the number of tinkers present is starting to overwhelm me. My power is working on overdrive trying to analyze every bit of tinkertech equipment being worn around me and my head is starting to ache. Using repair doesn't seem to be doing anything to dull the pain so I guess I'll have to power through it.
It isn't all bad, mind you. The headache is dulled by my excitement, the entrance to Sphere's facility is packed with tinkers and my head is overflowing with inspiration. Despite being filled mostly with tinkers I don't recognize, sometimes the crowd moves just enough for me to catch a glimpse at a piece of tinkertech so amazing my power stops analyzing everything else just to focus on it.
So far, I've been able to extrapolate the presence of a few legendary tinkers by the information my power feeds me. There's Dynamo and his brute nullifier armor. I caught a glimpse of Schrodinger and my power even informed me about a piece of tinkertech whose producer is almost certainly Euclid. I'm assuming he's employed by Sphere since there's no way his facility has enough space to accommodate everyone.
Everything else my power scanned so far ranges from regular tinkertech to ground breaking. Unfortunately, the ones with ground breaking equipment almost always squander their potential. Those that don't generally become highly respected respected members of the community and are usually ranked in the top one thousand tinkers worldwide. People have been trying to estimate how high Hero would rank since the ranking system emerged but I guess we'll know for sure by the end of the event.
There's also been a few incidents but that's expected even at an event of this size. Since the event officially began, five disguised Yangban capes haves been captured within a period of eight hours. I don't know why they even tried. The only place more protected than this is the Watchdog's headquarters.
There's a few employees at the front of the facility distributing maps and giving us tinkertech bands meant to display our identity but the number of attendees is just too large for them to deal with so the waiting time to get in is quite large. I could've entered earlier but I went to the back of the crowd just so my power would have more time to analyze tinkertech.
I've spent the last eight hours waiting for my turn in virtual reality with my armor on autopilot. I'm getting a live feed from my helmet cameras displayed on a small screen in the virtual room so I can look around and tinker at the same time. My power doesn't care either way, it analyzes things even when I'm not looking so being in VR is a better use of my time. I also started to design a small tinkertech business card to pass around once inside.
In preparation for my tinker's association project, I plan to advertise myself as someone who can help any tinker regardless of specialization and who has access to vast amounts of resources. In order to display that, each card will have an extremely small ascendant matter power source as a testament to my abilities. I don't have many people to compare myself to but I'm most likely in the top one percent tinkers worldwide in terms of power sources. After all, just the small amount of ascendant matter in each card is able to power a city block for years.
I'll also have to ask around to make sure my portals won't interfere with whatever Euclid did to Sphere's facility. With Euclid's reputation, his tech breaking down would most likely kill everyone on site. I remember him causing quite the scandal a few years ago when one of his broken pieces of tinkertech killed a villain by fusing her body with a concrete wall. His career hasn't been going all that well since then and an accident on this scale is the last thing any of us needs.
My focus is broken by my power suddenly diverting all its attention on a teenage girl near me. From what my power is telling me, her gauntlets allow for high level telekinesis and are only limited by available energy. The possibilities are amazing.
Seeing the opportunity, I call three of my portal drones to my side and reach on the other side of a newly opened portal for one of my finished business cards. The action seems to startle a few nearby tinkers but my attention isn't on them. I approach the girl and throw her a card that she catches with telekinesis.
I quickly start talking to ward of any awkward silences. "Call me if you need anything. Your tech has a lot of potential and I want to see how far you can go with the right resources."
Her response is interrupted by an employee asking me not to cause any commotions. Seems like it's my turn to enter.
———————————————————–
I now understand why it took so long to enter. This whole place is like a god damned maze, a four dimensional maze at that. Multiple places are superpositioned on top of each other and one corridor can take you to five different cafeterias despite only having enough place for one on paper. The closest thing to it I can think of is that magic school from that earth Aleph book but more confusing. Luckily for me, my suit's computers seem to understand the map well enough for me to trust the autopilot.
On the way to my assigned stall, I stopped at the information office to get my portals approved and I bought a pretty good hologram generator for a hundred pounds of processed steel at another tinkers stall. She was friendly so I left her a business card and an offer for cheap optic cables printed to her specifications.
Each stall has enough space to demonstrate a few things but I decided to connect mine by portal to my personal testing area in Brockton Bay anyway. I could've set a virtual testing area but I doubt most people will trust me enough to try so the portal is the next best thing. Other than the food, I don't have much else that can be demonstrated here. My artificial gravity generator supposedly interferes with Euclid's tech so testing for that has to happen on the other side and my portals are demonstrated by simply using them to get to my testing area.
The list of things I can show off back home is much longer though. There's every variation of my mute field emitters, a few 3D printers, I can show my power sources and there's even a shooting range for the portal gun.
For now though, I'm in a ten to one virtual room making basic blueprints out of everything my power analyzed. I'm not interested in copying other tinker's designs but every bit of improvement that can be jammed into my tech is good. The most interesting thing my power analyzed was the teenage girl's telekinetic gauntlets, the things essentially create motion by making energy reactions in higher dimensions using lower dimensional energies like electricity which has a trickle down effect of creating motion in our world.
As I thought before, the tech is only limited by available energy but there's also another factor to consider. The higher dimensional energy reactions used are a bit like chemistry, the better you understand the cause of a reaction, the better you can fine tune it. You can make it more powerful or more efficient with the right reaction. The girl's problem is that her power doesn't seem all that good at higher dimensional chemistry. Her current recipe is about as efficient as black powder being compared to a nuclear bomb.
If she had the right formula, she could produce brute 8 level force for barely a gigajoule of energy. Preferably, most of the reaction's power would come from higher dimensional energies. Problem is that none of my current 3D printers are good enough to even copy her current telekinesis gauntlets. I don't know how she built hers but I suspect she's one of those bullshit tinkers who can make high end tinkertech with their bare hands and minimal materials.
Since the event will go on for four more days and I'm only supposed to be on a meeting in the next two days, I think I'll stay at my stall for at least half the day and spend the rest looking around other stalls for interesting tinkertech. I'm not worried about any thieves since all my equipment is either on me or equipped with EMP shielded trackers.
Just as I exit the virtual room to go exploring, a hero stops in front of my stall and looks around. It takes me a moment to recognize Chevalier since he's not wearing his distinctive medieval armor, the only thing identifying him as the famous hero is a knight helmet painted in his color scheme. I wonder why he's not wearing armor.
———————————————————–
(Short Chevalier interlude)
This event is quickly turning into a headache. Euclid's tinkertech is stopping me from wearing my usual equipment and I keep getting visions from people I can't see. There's also an anomaly, multiple visions everywhere in the facility that are somehow all related to each other, thousands of them in fact.
Each and every stall is filled with ghostly images of researchers observing and talking to each other. Even weirder, some of them have stopped to look at me as if knowing of my observations. My initial mission was to observe a list of tinkers but finding the anomaly's origin takes precedent. Anomalous visions often mean a stronger power.
The amount of ghostly researchers gets higher the closer I get to a certain place and by the time the stall is within sight, the number is staggering. The space is so filled with them that some of the ghosts seem to fuse with each other to make space for more. When I finally arrive, the anomaly's origin surprises me. It's the cape that saved Hannah. The one that unmasked in Brockton Bay and more importantly, the one that woke up Hero.
He's sitting in a reinforced chair in front of a desk filled with some kind of orange mushroom. Interestingly, the room is almost empty of ghosts. The only ones present seem to be the result of countless fusions if the way their edges are blurring together is any indication. Some of them are even going inside of him temporarily and other densely fused ghosts from outside the stall keep making their way to him and entering his body.
The sight is unnerving in a way quite different from any previous vision. Some of the ghosts look like children and some look like old people, the only similarity between them is the intense look they send my way. Looking at the more dense ghosts is headache inducing and I keep getting flashes of memories but none of them make sense to me. I guess I'll have to talk to him if I want more information.
"I've been told you're the one responsible for saving Miss Militia's life" his response seems almost startled.
"I just did what I needed to do, it's partially my fault she got hurt in the first place." At least he's honest about it.
"I'd still like to thank you for saving my friends life, your involvement in the chain of events that lead to her injuries matters little to me." He remains awkwardly silent so I keep speaking. "I'm also here to inquire about buying some tinkertech materials for my equipment and I've been told you have a pretty broad specialization."
His response is a bit informal but I can allow that from the one that saved Hannah and Hero. "well, you'd have to give me some specifications before I propose anything but I'm confident I can make anything you could need." He stops his speech for a second as some hidden drones form a circle at the back of his stall. The portal that ignites surprises me for a second but my lack of focus lasts only a moment.
"if you would follow me, this portal leads to my workshop in Brockton Bay and I have some materials there you could test" he doesn't leave me much time to think before going through. "oh and stay away from edges, I could heal you but losing a limb is always painful not matter how short it lasts."
Despite being surprised by the portals range, I quickly step through and decide to do a little test once on the other side. I take out one of my spare aluminum masks and push it against the portal's edges. The mask is cut in two pieces with absolutely zero resistance, the line left by the cut has a mirror finish to it. The shock doesn't even have time to settle before I hear Everyman say "I told you so, those edges will cut through just about anything under brute 9 in durability."
Now that I'm not focused on the portal, I can see that we're inside Everyman's workshop. He gestures towards a table with a few knives displayed and starts to explain each of them. "The one on the right is made from an alloy called saturnite, it can cut through metal like butter and it keeps a good edge for a long time but it absorbs and maintains heat way too well for its own good. You leave that thing in the sun for half an hour and it'll be boiling hot for half the day."
To demonstrate, he picks up the knife and embeds it through the three inch thick metal table it just sat on with little apparent difficulty. Since apparences can be deceiving and he's wearing power armor, I decide to test for myself.
Without much effort, the knife slides out of the table and I try to stab the table myself. The same result happens although it takes me a bit more effort than shown to embed the knife through the table. Everyman resumes his explanation once he sees I'm satisfied with my test.
"The second knife is made from a mix of multiple exotic resins and cuts even better than the first one on top of being so durable that I doubt anyone besides Alexandria could break it." I don't have any way to test Everyman's claims about its durability but the sharpness isn't a lie, this knife can probably cut through my current armor with minimal force. The knife is a bit too lethal for everyday crime fighting but I'll probably use it in Endbringer fights if I end up buying it.
Compared to the previous two, the last knife isn't sharp or durable. Instead, what makes it special is the craftsmanship. The blade is made of Damascus steel and the metal's pattern twists into the image of a forest along the blades length. I personally wouldn't use it in a fight but I know for a fact many collectors would pay exorbitant amounts of money to make it part of their collection. It's certainly beyond my means. Everyman brings back my attention with a small cough and resumes speaking.
"all in all, a blade the size of your cannonblade would cost you around five thousand dollars and would be ready a week after this event is done." The price is oddly low for something this useful, my job expenses can cover it.
By the time we're done talking business, I'm no closer to understanding the ghosts but I've gained a great deal of information about Everyman. His business card is tucked away in my coat pocket and I'm satisfied knowing my effectivity in Endbringer fights will rise soon. The ghosts weren't doing anything hostile as far as I can tell anyway, just another weird quirk that comes with high level powers.
The return to Sphere's facility brings back the headache inducing amount of visions and I can't help but think that the next four days will be horrible.
A.N: this is my first try at an interlude and it was way harder than I expected. I hope it was good enough either way but I want to improve on that in the future. Some details about the protagonists powers have been revealed and by now I've put enough small details around different chapters that some people might be able to guess what Everyman's tinker power is. Small hint, his power is similar to Dragon's meaning that it's more of a thinker power that allows for tinker like abilities. I'm planning to make the Sphere's meeting arc' last a few more chapters but no longer than four. Hope you enjoyed, till next time. Comments and advice are always appreciated.