12th May 2011- Savannah Hawthorne
Savannah worked, that was her thing. It was how Hero had done it, it was how Dragon did it and it was what her parents had drilled into her from the moment she could talk. The sky was the limit, they said, but you had to work for it.
Things outside of work were distractions, so you had to make logical arguments to keep parents happy. You weren't hanging out with friends, you were networking with other Wards. You weren't reading SciFi, you were looking for inspiration. You weren't messaging a boy you liked, you were using him as a go-between to get the ear of Armsmaster. You were always doing something else and none of it was ever enjoyable; an endless grind to make someone else happy.
Savannah was lucky, then, that Tinkering made her happy. Or at least distracted her from moping about not spending time with friends and living life. That with Tinkering there were always improvements to make was a habit she tried to incorporate into her own life, every advancement another step in throwing off her shackles and leaving home. Joining the Protectorate would be another shackle, but it would be one she chose and, with any luck, a less restrictive one. She understood that she wasn't immediately signed up, there would need to be a new contract drawn up; one in which she could get concessions. Not that she would leave the city, New York was where she wanted to be, but that she wouldn't have to deal with her parents again.
To her, it still seemed a little childish to need help with that once she was an adult but the thought of true independence unsettled her.
Other things unsettled her these days, both related. Greg had been attacked again and forced to kill. She didn't know what to do about it. These kinds of things had always seemed to be more 'out there' rather than immediate concerns to her. There was a lot to unpack with it all.
Greg had run afoul of a supervillain named Coil who had responded by framing him for releasing Empire Eighty-Eight identities. Savannah had heard vaguely about it before they had met, it was national news for a little while, but hadn't paid it much mind. It was an out-there problem. And again, after she'd met him she had a peripheral understanding of why he was in Boston, but again it was not her issue. Now though, that she had gotten to know him, it was a 'right here' problem. It was unlikely they would ever meet in person again, soon to be on other sides of the country, and that made her uneasy.
It was, for this reason, she worked now. She didn't like feeling uneasy, and especially didn't like not understanding exactly why she felt as such, and so she avoided the issue by working.
Her current project was to work out a way her thrusters could be utilised to fire blasts of energy. She wasn't sure if the committee would sign off on a weapon, but she wasn't making a weapon she was designing a shielding blast; wink.
Her flight suit currently had eight thrusters, one on each hand and foot, on each elbow and each shoulder, made efficient by the addition of an anti-grav panel running down its back. With her body artificially lightened so the thrusters could either save energy by being able to run on a lower setting or, push her to ludicrously faster speeds than she could achieve without. Her intent today was to get all eight thrusters to fire a wall of energy that could stop a bullet without disrupting her flight, and if it just so happened that she could also use them to fire a beam then that was also a win.
For anyone but a Tinker, it would have been tedious beyond compare. Building a replica thruster, adjusting the code, modifying the thruster output, simulating a test, repairing the thruster when the test knocked something loose; then repeating this many times over. It wasn't something she could do in an afternoon or even several afternoons. Builds like this were an involved process and unfortunately in the Protectorate Tinker schematics she had access to there was nothing to help her speed up the process as there had been with the anti-grav panelling. Multiple Tinkers were able to work with anti-grav so all she'd had to do was lift their designs and build it herself, but no Tinkers worked with her engine tech so she was the forerunner. She'd had some help, mainly from Dragon who saw fit to repay her for using her engine designs, and Dragon had obviously consulted with Armsmaster given the size and efficiency of the engine designs they gave back to her.
That had been the last help she'd gotten, though it had helped her produce the most sophisticated, efficient engine system yet and saved her years of time. Gone was the clunky turbine and in had come the sleek plasma emitter engine.
It was still unfortunately difficult to adjust and even she could only work for so long. Her scheduled three hours Tinker-time ended and personal flight time started.
It was by far her favourite time.
Savannah dashed to the change room and shimmied out of her casual clothes and shimmied into her flight suits underlayer. The strapping on of her flight suit was a much more involved process; it was like putting on a fighter jet.
The concept of her flight suit married power armour with aerodynamics, it was sturdy enough to tank most gunfire yet light enough to achieve flight. The downside of it all being crammed into a human-sized suit was there was no cockpit to neatly climb into. The armour came apart into six parts, the torso, the legs, the arms and the helmet and each needed to be manually attached. A well-practised jigsaw was still a jigsaw, putting it all together took time.
Attaching the torso and the helmet was always the first step. Housed in the helmet was her H.U.D supplemented by a basic AI which ran the start-up diagnostic to make sure she connected everything correctly and in the correct order.
It took the better part of half an hour to hook everything up and make sure it wouldn't come undone while she was flying. Servos whirred as her numerous flight stabilisers went through their motions to ensure none were sticking and a feeling of glorious weightlessness came over her as the anti-grav kicked in, picking her up off the floor to hover a few inches above it. Her thrusters hissed, glowing a bright electric blue, and she slowly flew forward. The H.U.D mapping out her surroundings with blue wire lines, showing safe flight paths, providing information on suit integrity and settings. The wall opened up for her to her flight pad and she floated forward to the middle.
The AI read her body language, something that had taken a good while to teach it, and ignited the engines. Her thrusters flared in a bright actinic flash, rocketing her off toward the sky. Savannah screamed, laughed, as the forces pressed against her. Even lessened by the anti-grav the feeling of pure acceleration still sent her giddy. It made every second spent in the lab worth it.
Her thrusters burned brighter still as she gained speed, curving in a wide arc around Longbeach and up toward Long Island. A slight adjustment of her posture sent her low, skimming over the tops of waves. Her radar highlighted a particularly big wave and her AI automatically adjusted her course to avoid ploughing through it. Savannah tilted, spiralling upward around the wave and continued to gain height until the lights of the buildings to her left were just dots on the big shadow of the land. Before long a big red wall appeared on her display, it was her limit. She wasn't supposed to go past it, and the Protectorate would be alerted if she did. Her AI started slowing her down and she came to a stop just before the wall.
There was… a burning feeling? In her chest, an uncomfortable, indescribable worry. She wanted to go past the wall.
Greg was past the wall. She wanted to go see him, it felt right too, to talk to him in person about his being attacked and his moving away. It hadn't been an issue beforehand, Brockton Bay wasn't far from New York and she was sure that if she asked a visit would have been allowed. Though she hadn't particularly cared to ask before all of this something had changed when he told her about Cricket. Usually, she didn't have much of a heart for things like that, she knew she was terrible about comforting even her team when they were upset; it had bothered her, but not much. Now though, looking back, she felt uneasy about how she was.
Being an only child with a half dozen solitary extracurriculars didn't engender itself to producing a likable personality and she'd never cared enough to fix it.
Savannah hung in the air before the wall, the red covering her entire field of vision, and waited.
13th May 2011- Tyrone Watts
Mouse Protector was late.
Though she wasn't Protectorate anymore she still spent time on joint patrols and was trusted enough to leave Wards to. As a teleporter, she was never late. Neither was she early. She could arrive precisely when she meant to.
It was weird, but Tyrone wasn't going to complain. He rubbed his tired eyes through the holes in his mask and yawned, sinking deeper still into the couch. Patrolling with Mouse Protector was usually kind of fun, and kind of exhausting; she was a master of talking without saying anything until you said something she could use to ridicule you mercilessly. It was her whole schtick with villains, especially the serious ones, but was less fun when it was you. She was usually better about it with Wards, but it wasn't something he minded skipping.
More time to chill out by himself, something that was lacking these days. The East Coast seemed to be going to shit all at once. In Portland the Dollhouse were going ballistic and retaliating after one of their capes was accidentally killed by the PRT, here in Boston Accord was going at it with the Teeth again, in Brockton, it was the Empire and the Azn Bad Boys, a series of minor happenings in some of the bigger cities all the way down to Miami where they'd just uncovered some previously unknown parahuman serial killer's huge burial grounds.
Insane. The world was insane. Murderous Nazi's trying to kill his friends, the Slaughterhouse Nine, Endbringers. Crazy. Leviathan was going to attack somewhere soon, too, so that was a city written off.
His parents used to tell him stories of what the world was like for them before the eighties. Things could still be bad, but the scale was less. The world was less depressing. They'd said that, even though they weren't alive at that point, the world wars hadn't had such a profoundly negative impact.
All he wanted was to sit on this couch and do nothing, to be insulated from the outside. And yet, by unfortunate habit, his mind wouldn't let him. He would picture those things in his imagination, turning the images around in his mind's eye to inspect for details that needed adding or to be taken away. His power needed that kind of focus, so his mind kept wanting to go down that route even with distasteful imagery. It was great for when he wanted to use his power to recreate hot girls he'd seen, but not for this.
Tyrone shuffled around until his pockets were no longer pulled tight against his leg and eased out his phone, opening the Discord app he used to talk Magic the Gathering and look at related memes. He flicked through images for a few minutes, occasionally smiling or exhaling sharply through his nose, then rubbed at his tired eyes again. He flicked over to his contacts and dialled Greg.
Greg picked up after four rings.
"Hey, buddy, what be the hippety haps?" Tyrone asked.
"Meh," said Greg. "The ushe. Armsmaster made everyone chip in to buy me a motorbike as a present, then I ate a bunch of maintenance and mechanics books and I've just been kind of sitting in the garage by myself fiddling with it."
"Well, that's nice of them."
Greg hadn't had much nice to say about his previous team, who had been a bunch of snobbish dicks.
"Yeah, I guess."
"What kind of bike?"
"One of the PRT second-hand ones, a Kawasaki Ninja," Greg sighed. "It was nice of them, it's a decent bike."
"Are there a lot of bike areas in LA?"
"Yeah, probably."
Tyrone frowned, paused. "Silver lining though, you get to work with Alexandria."
"Hmmm, yeah. Did I tell you she originally wanted me to transfer there when I came to Boston?"
"Nope."
The faint sounds of tools on metal echoed through the phone.
"Because of my obvious potential. Armsmaster thinks she wants to groom me for leadership somewhere, he has a hunch they want to snake me up the ladder in Las Vegas one day."
"You do have a good Thinker power."
Greg snorted and there was the sound of spanner hitting concrete, then a distant crash of breaking glass.
"It's what got me into this mess. It's too good. Or maybe I was too loose with it. I dunno."
"Nah, dude, you did the right thing. I'm pretty sure it's aiding and abetting if you know who a Villain's moles are and you don't tell anybody."
"Yeah," said Greg. "It's something like that."
Tyrone didn't know what else to say. What did you say for this? Sorry, a Nazi tried to kill you?
The big door to the Wards area opened up and Quartet, who had been brought in to replace Bastion, poked her head in.
"Change of plans, Reynard, you're on with me."
Saved by the bell.
"OK, I gotta go, man, my patrol partner's here. I'll talk to you later."
"No problem, broski."
"Peace out," Tyrone hung up, a scummy weight congealing in his belly.
"Quickly, please," said Quartet, in a way that was more telling than asking.
"Coming."
Tyrone flopped out of his warm, comfortable position and followed her out the door.
"Where's Mouse Protector?"
"Missing, apparently," replied Quartet, shrugging. The musical notes on her shoulders glinting mesmerisingly with the motion. "No one's heard from her in a few days, but, well, when you're an indie cape you get to pick your own holidays, eh?"
