9th May 2011- Colin Wallis

'To the one desirous of learning the beginning arte of the Harmonious Adepts look no further than this auspicious tome, for in it I have humbly compilede the exacting steps for creating a disruptive sonorous wave to throw the auditory perceptions of one's foes into a spiral moste confusing.'

It made sense, technically. The 'skill book' was logically coherent. If magic were real it seemed likely that by following the instructions in this book you could learn the ability. The crux of the issue was that magic wasn't damn well real and Colin couldn't learn it.

It was just Greg's luck that he was not only the Crawler of the Dauntless Genre, without the mutations, but also a Reverse Butcher, without the voices and madness. It was an absurd amount of convenient power to concentrate in the hands of a fifteen-year-old boy; it should have been concentrated in his hands.

Briefly, Colin fantasized about having triggered with that power and all the glory he could have accrued in his many years of service putting the boot to crime. He shook his head to clear away the distracting train of thought, it never did him any good to get bogged down in imagined power.

He closed the skill book gently and set it back down on the table. All the tests he'd run had proved was that it was nothing more than a normal book made out of normal materials, for all it looked like an ancient fantasy tome bound in real, weathered leather with genuine parchment for pages. It was an ordinary book, nothing more, apparently created only able to interface with Greg's power. No insights were to be gained from reading it, even to Dragon it may as well have just been a fictional novel.

The one benefit of this was, with the spiking gang war, Colin was getting a lot of good press for smashing Nazi and ABB skulls, but even that was soured by Greg's leaving. Alexandria was poaching him, no doubt to claim all the credit of his making. But it was Colin alone who first saw his potential, who moulded the boy, who spent all the time and effort hamming out of him the frivolous idiocy he came in with and casting him into a more useful, more mature mould. All that time end effort wasted.

Well, Colin though, mostly wasted. Greg was better off and could still put in a good word for his first mentor in the event he was asked about suitable promotions.

An alarm interrupted his spiralling thoughts. It was time to put on his armour and get to work.


With his halberd touching the wall he could map out the entire building and the positions of those in it, to a diminishing degree further in, purely from the vibrations the occupants caused. It had taken him six years of building and rebuilding to reach this level of resolution, Greg had killed one person and gotten a power that let him do the same thing.

"Prep the breaching charge."

The PRT troops moved at his command, placing strips of explosive around the edges of the front door. A counter ticked down in the corner of his HUD and, as it reached five Armsmaster held up his armoured hand and matched the count down. Upon his fist the charges went off, burning the outline out of the door. Armsmaster moved forward, a single casual kick reducing the door into splinters, and led the way into the building followed by his backup.

Armsmaster's gear pierced through the smoke and dust, the frantic shouts of the ABB gun runners only serving to provide more data for his sensory equipment. He moved smoothly, casually tilting his halberd and firing off the flail, the ball rocketing off to smash in the teeth of the idiot who just poked his head around the corner of the hallway. Armsmaster raised his halberd like a javelin, aiming system calculating the physics to have it land sideways, facing the direction of the man whose jaw he just broke.

The flail lashed out again, smashing a cry from the other guy hiding around the corner. The halberd flashed blue, turning into a mess of lines that reappeared in Armsmaster's hand.

He strode around the corner, tapping the now two tined tips of the halberd to the downed gangsters with a sharp zak. They seized as the voltage wracked their muscles, Armsmaster stepping over them.

"First floor secured, take 'em away."

Armsmaster continued through the first floor, ignoring the empty side rooms, the tip of his halberd dragging against the ceiling. The ABB had holed up in the room the furthest from the stairs. It seemed, coincidentally, that it was also the room with all the guns.

A compartment in the side of his power armour popped open and he took out a containment foam grenade, attaching it to the underside of the halberd a bit behind the blade. He continued his steady stride up the stairs and through the rest of the second floor until he came to the heavy door at the end. With a confident hand, he extended his halberd, the blade humming with plasma, and cut into the door like it was butter. There were a few gunshots, but it was a reinforced door so Armsmaster didn't know what they expected. It was probably fear, but that was the appropriate reaction.

He made his last cut, the outline of a rough circle burned through the metal-backed hardwood door, letting through slivers of light. He thrust the halberd forward, the now regularly sharp tip popping the cut circle cleanly out of the door with the tip of his weapon, including foam grenade, poking through. There were more gunshots but none came close to hitting him as he fired the grenade. There was a pop and a lengthy fizzy bubbling as the foam expanded, muffling the shouts of the men and cutting off the gunshots.

"Second floor secured, hostiles contained."

Armsmaster retracted his halberd, the full length pulling into itself and placed it against his back where it stuck, magnetised.

Suddenly, a man in the room. Armsmaster turned, taking in the short, wiry figure and grinning red Oni mask.

"Pack it in, Lee, this one's already over."

Oni Lee was still and silent, then suddenly another appeared behind Armsmaster, and another and another. The duplicates raised their hands in unison, pulled grenade pins glinting in their fingers.

Burning blue light burst out of his armour, spinning slowly around him. He saw the explosions, but couldn't hear or feel them. Dust choked his vision, but when his shield dropped his echolocation told him that Oni Lee had vanished. It was a formality. Armsmaster would be hard-pressed to catch Lee, and Lee would be hard-pressed to do enough damage to take him out of the fight. Such was life.

Fighting longer would be pointless for both of them, it was easier for Lee to just take the loss.

"Sir?" came the question over the comms.

"Just Oni Lee. The operation continues as is."

Armsmaster tromped back down past his assigned troopers. They'd do their job, he didn't need to stand around and hold their hand. He left through the kicked-in door and crossed over to his motorcycle. There was a level of tiredness that, once you were there, everything hurt. Muscles, eyes, you could even feel it in your heart. But it kept beating and you kept moving. He straddled the bike, sinking into the low slung seat, activating his snooze protocols. The seat tilted back and his armour locked him into a comfortable lean, soothing ocean waves playing through his helmet.

Armsmaster set an alarm for twenty minutes and closed his eyes.


10th May 2011- Amy Dallon

Amy sparked up a fat Smartjoint and kicked off her shoes.

She took a deep draw, savouring the mellow chocolate flavour as the carefully crafted compounds in the smoke did their work. Tension bled out of her, all the stress of never being able to make more than the smallest chip at the mountain that was the worlds suffering fading away. Her mind, however, remained sharp. Calm and sharp.

She blew out the smoke, which faded into the air of her warehouse. And it was her warehouse now, that same abandoned wreck she and Greg had used months ago to awkwardly… she didn't even know what it was they were doing. Greg had said that killing monsters made him permanently stronger but he'd been shaking in his stupid velcro shoes the whole time. In any case, it was a horrible experience for both of them, and Amy was glad it was a very short-lived enterprise.

It had, however, inspired her greatest works. The pain had paid out a hundredfold with the expansion of her absurdly narrow worldview.

The warehouse was now spotlessly clean, the interior boarded over with a few dandelions that had been growing in the cracks of concrete in the floor and expanded over weeks into what would appear to be smooth wooden panelling. Amy's bare feet touched the floor, connecting her to the entire organism, sections of the ceiling sliding back to let in the sunlight.

It was how she'd always imagined a Tinker lair. Nobody could get in without her power unless they wanted to break in (an endeavour she'd made purposefully difficult,) and without her to deactivate the security the entire thing would dissolve into unrecoverable, vile-smelling sludge. Thus, she wasn't afraid of being discovered, it would be inconvenient at worst.

Amy hefted her bag of food scraps as the doorway sealed behind her, dimming the light in the warehouse a little, and tossed it bodily across the room into the gaping maw of her goo maker. The goo maker made the goo she used to shape her creations. As the goo maker chowed down on her refuse she walked over to the water dispenser, taking another puff of her Smartjoint. A paper cup, handmade of course, sat on top of the water dispenser. It was designed after an office water cooler but was entirely biological, but functioned more or less the same. Water collected from outside, be it rain or mist or dew, was funnelled into it and purified.

Amy filled her cup and took a sip; delicious.

What she was here for today was to make a going away present for Greg as well as work on her meat suit. For his present, she was going to give him a stash of drugs. Both Smartjoints and her as of yet unnamed pills. The strong stuff, he was a regenerator and could handle it. Amy couldn't, they were the prototype she'd made and she'd nearly fried her brain. Normal humans couldn't handle that kind of cognitive overclocking, even her weaker version still left her with an outrageous hangover and she was sure if she slammed them back to back her brain would eventually just shut down.

The drugs were easy to make at this point, she'd had enough practice and had all the materials ready. Amy made her way to the goo maker to retrieve some goo from its goo storage. She put a hand to it and a sphincter opened in its side, revealing the brackish looking goo. There was a bit of a sour smell as she plunger her hand into it, information flooding her brain. She could feel the billions of microscopic organisms that made up the goo, all churning and writhing in her grip. She used her power to bind a great handful together and lifted it out of the muck, closing the sphincter behind her.

She carried it over to her workbench, a sturdy, sleek protrusion from the wall with an organic claw-footed swivel chair in front of it.

The chair came into her awareness as she plonked herself down on it, the claw-footed legs stretching and flexing as she moved closer to the bench. She split the goo ball in half, holding each in a hand, and got to work. A papery tip soon protruded from the ball, every second another sliver built up behind the protrusion pushing it further and further out. Soon enough a fully formed, crisp joint fell gently onto the table. These too were stronger than her usual, which made her nauseous, but again Greg had a Brute rating so he should be fine.

Another joint fell on top of the first, hitting at an angle and rolling away off the edge of the desk. Amy sighed, bending down to pick it up, then shaped the desk to have raised edges. Once the material in her left hand had been used up, resulting in a pile of about fifteen Smartjoints, she got to work on the pills. The process was the same, pills forcing their way out of the goo ball and falling fully formed onto her desk.

It was quite quick work and would have been a slack gift if they were not near priceless performance enhancers. She had even considered selling to the Protectorate after Greg had told her Armsmaster would be willing to pay out the nose for anything that might give him a slight edge.

It was an avenue she was considering after her company was properly up and running. If she could get it that kind of government contracts were retiring early money every year for what would probably be less than an hour of actual work a day.

Amy took another sip of water and dusted off her hands, leaning back in her chair and stretching her arms above her head with her fingers intertwined. She let out one of those groans you do when you stretch real good that sound really weird to anyone nearby. With a contented sigh, she settled back in her chair, seizing hold of its biology and piloting it over to the meat suit.

She wasn't going to use it for going out and fighting crime, or any other stupid horseshit like that; it was more like an advanced prosthetic. Sure, it had an extremely basic neural system that could be taught to fight but that was just an extension of the suit needing to learn not to exceed her physical limits and break her spine. For the most part, the suit would take the strain off her body, shrug off small arms fire, recycle bodily waste and make it look like she had a bigger set of tits.

Life, Amy though, was finally getting pretty good.