Ascent 2.5
Wednesday was going to be our busiest day yet, so as soon as I was up we headed to the shop.
Science Check(Int): Rolled 9+2 vs. difficulty 13. Fail.
I only dedicated an hour to researching the mysteries of the universe, and when it bore no fruit I switched tracks. Richard had spent the last hour boosting his skills for my benefit and it wouldn't do to keep him waiting.
I'd thought about what Zach had said yesterday, namely his suggestion to 'Send anything earth-shattering to Dragon or the Patent Office.' Thanks to the power of bullshit skill checks, I now had rough production processes for three things that could change the world: a revolutionary power cell, a suite of medicines that would shake the medical world, and a patch that could make bringing someone back from the brink of death so simple, you could include the steps for first aid on the peel-off sterile packaging. These things were needed on Earth Bet twenty years ago, which meant that I needed factories and chemical plants to be retooling for production as soon as possible.
To do that, I needed patents pending for every single innovation involved, FCC signoffs for the electronics in the cells, FDA testing for the pharmaceuticals, and the approval of whatever administrations the nanites and artificial blood cells in the Laz patch needed besides the FDA and CDC. Richard joined me with a literal sheaf of papers, a professional attitude, and the online degree in patent law he'd been refreshing himself on for the last hour, and we started filling out forms and drawing up schematics, chemical formulas, and production processes as fast as possible.
Bureaucracy Check(Int): Rolled 9+0 vs. difficulty 8. Pass.
Four hours later, Richard was still giving me disbelieving looks out of the corner of his eye, checking over the documentation that I'd finished at a frankly inhuman pace without even minor errors. The schematics were taking a bit longer to draw up in a readable fashion, but I was almost… done!
You know how to mass produce three vital pieces of future technology. Minor Goal Complete. 700 xp.
Tech designed for mass production or mass human benefit will now award minor xp bonuses.
Level Up!
"Fuck!" I cursed, my pencil snapping on half when I jerked in surprise. The feeling of crackling, pulsing energy rushed through my head. My well of power swelled to twice the size it had been at the start of the day, and burned new channels of power through my brain like slow-motion lightning crawling through numbed flesh. One solidified a moment later, my primary powers already chosen for me. With a thought, the unassigned channel thickened and changed, granting me a power I had a feeling I'd be using a lot. Healing 1d8+Con mod wasn't much for me once I had a few levels, but I doubted any non-Brutes here had all that much hp. Richard had gone down in one hit, and it couldn't have been all that much damage.
Richard shot me a look, and went back to filing the forms into folders.
The level up had come just as I finished the last line of the last sketch. Real me thought he was being funny, apparently, because said schematic of the production process for "Solid State Capacitor-Battery Hybrid Cell" now had a jagged scribble from my mini-seizure. I sighed, grabbed the eraser end of the pencil, and fixed the errors. I still had a lot to do today before Zach and I went out for the night's attack, and the work never ceased.
Come to think of it, now I had to add impromptu surgery to the list, because I sure as hell wasn't ready to find out how eldritch brain-frying space magic healing handled stitches and staples.
Recalibrating Loot Tables...
More than any moment up to this point, I was regretting my decision to join up with these two.
Zach sighed. "From the top, one more time. I handle the intro. I talk a bit about the gap in our streams, make an apology for the thing, yadda yadda-"
I cut in. "That's really not something to yadda yadda-"
"Yeah, yeah, anyway," he said, waving me down, "Then we have the big reveal. 'We have an announcement,' I say, 'A new player has joined the game. Introducing, Meta!' and the camera pans to you. What do you say?"
"Do we really have to make a big deal of this?" I complained. "Last I checked, at least half of your team wants me out of here by mid-May."
"Rich is fine, he's just pissed about the shit you pulled," Zach said earnestly. "I am too, mind you, but there was always gonna be drama with this, and just getting back some of our older projects has been more than enough to make up for it." He glanced over at the Pile, and I knew he was mentally picking out more stuff for me to 'repair' from dangerously unstable tinkertech to functional pretech. We already had an assortment of wacky tools and gizmos thanks to my efforts, including a gaudy crown that could crudely simulate telepathic communication, a backpack of holding that Richard claimed immediately, and a limited-self-replicating robotic attack chicken.
Of course, if I kept leveling up from doing stuff with technology, I was happy to be a repairman.
Zach shook himself out of his daydreaming. "Right, um, your introduction. 'A new player has joined the game. Introducing, Meta!'"
I shrugged, and responded.
Loading Cutscene…
"Glad to be here, Leet," I said in my best impression of twitch streamer conversational tone. "Viewers, let me ask you something. Have you ever watched a speedrun and thought, 'Hey, that doesn't seem so hard,' and try it for yourself? Do you get one trick first try, but others remain frustratingly out of reach? Well, so do I, and I'm tired of it. Consider me your guide to breaking the game, one glitch at a time."
Leet shot me a quick thumbs up as the Snitch rotated back to him. Pushing his voice up to a high and nasal tone he used in reference to the 8-year-olds that inspired his name, he said, "Well, tonight we have a treat. The Ronin have pushed this city too far, and it's up to the Third Street Saints to take them down." The Snitch flew up and took a sweeping shot of our group; Uber had five men and women(their Minions, apparently) with us as support, all of them dressed in various outfits in purple, heavily armed with mundane weaponry and(mostly) nonlethal rounds, and kitted out with body armor under their clothes.
For myself, I was dressed in my starting outfit of unknown future fabric, now carefully lined with a thin, flexible psuedo-graphene material I'd scavenged from an old Zero Suit and topped with a violet leather jacket, external-steel-toed boots, and even more belts and buckles than before, holding everything from the Stun-Gun and a few flashbangs to a massive foam finger and a small bandolier of beer bottles. I'd finished it off with KISS-like face paint, sprayed-on purple and silver hair paint, and close-enough prescription sunglasses, aiming for a sort of death-metal goth theme. Leet had gone for a Matrix-like trenchcoat-turtleneck combo, concealing the reprogrammed hard-hologram pack and a veritable arsenal of tools and toys within the coat.
"I see you got here early," a female voice said from a nearby alley, turning heads. Tattletale walked out of the shadows a moment later, Regent right behind her. She didn't look amused. Well, Leet probably deserved it, considering the last time they'd met outside neutral ground.
"Tattletale, Regent," Leet said evenly. "Glad you could join us. Say hi to the stream?"
Regent snorted. "Fuck off."
Leet shrugged, turning away and pulling out a phone to edit the stream intro. I watched the two Undersiders, arms folded, trying to give nothing away.
Stealth Check(Wis): Rolled 6-1 vs. difficulty 10. Fail.
Tattletale smirked at me, murmuring something to her teammate. That had to be bad, right?
"So you're the newest recruit, huh?" she asked a moment later. Yeah, that was very bad.
"Name's Meta," I said. "Tattletale, right?"
"Yes, but you already knew that, didn't you?" She narrowed her eyes. "Wanna tell me why you think playing dumb will work, when you already know I can see right through you?"
I turned fully towards her, stepping away from the group so that I wasn't interrupting Leet's work or the quiet conversations of our Minions. "I think I was hoping you'd get the hint, but we both know that's not happening. Now, I think you and I need to have a talk."
"Oh?" she said smugly. "You don't seem like you want to talk. You want to get as far away from me as possible."
She was right; the very thought of having someone with her power in close proximity to the open book of my mind wasn't just a problem, it was a possible existential threat. One major detail, stolen without context and weaponized by her personality, could very well get everyone, on every possible Earth, killed. I couldn't say any of that, because that was exactly the kind of thing that would make Tattletale push harder. It was setting off my anxiety to just think about the issue while talking with her, and I hadn't had a panic attack since I'd dropped out of college.
I scowled at her, likely waiting just a bit too long to respond, thinking about how to approach this.
Persuade Check(Int): Rolled 8+1 vs. difficulty 10. Fail.
"What I want and what we need are two very different things, Tattletale." My tone was deeper than I'd planned, less the tone I'd take telling a friend to stop being an asshole, more the tone I took when something actually managed to piss me off. Despite my surprise, I went with it. "If you keep pushing my buttons and rifling through my shit, it might be enough for me to take it up with the alliance. I don't want to make an issue of it; I'd rather talk things out."
She considered it a moment. "You aren't going to report me to the alliance," she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, "but I'll keep to the truce regardless. Maybe once this is over, we'll have ourselves a little chat, cards on the table, and talk about the things you think you know." She glanced away briefly. "You'd better get back to your group, the others are arriving."
I wanted to give a rebuttal, but she was right. Two men in full field combat gear were approaching our corner from the east, accompanied by a man in red and black who wore a top hat. Trickster, then. Closer to us, a motorcycle pulled to a stop, bearing Faultline in her strange modern-samurai armor mashup. This team didn't have a lot of big muscle, which had me worried as I rejoined our group. Everyone here was baseline human, in terms of durability. Well, unless you counted me, but I sure didn't. If Lung was here for some reason, we'd have to pray one of the things Leet or I brought with us would suffice.
Faultline took the lead as Leet used subtle gestures of his left hand to guide the Snitch into a dramatic shot. "Alright, tonight we're taking down two assets, located within a half mile of each other and surrounded by mixed-use properties on both sides, meaning uninvolved civilians will be in close proximity to the action. This means that if possible, we take the assets out without collateral damage, got it?"
There were nods all around.
"Alright then, let's get to planning."