Wednesday April 13th

11.

Aria woke me early the next morning and as soon as my eyes opened a new room appeared over my bedroom. Strangely, the room itself was well lit whilst my bedroom remained dark with only a sliver of early morning sunlight edging around the curtains.

I knew instantly that this was another room that represented a power and not a new room that was being added to my little personal dimension. The room was a lab focussed on computers and calculations. Whiteboards covered the walls and massive calculations covered them in turn. In each case the calculation had massive amounts crossed out and a simple equation or set of steps scrawled beside them. I realised at a glance that I now had the ability to look at a solution to a problem and work out a much easier way to get there. I had gained super powered intuition.

I felt I had good understanding of the power but I would need to see the power in action to see how it'd help me reach my goals. The most intriguing thing was that I also now had a feel for the source from which my power was pulling thing from. It wasn't something visual but I could tell there were two layers or levels. The first level was an order of groups to which each individual power, the second level, belonged.

Many of my powers were the only power from their groups though I had two pairs. Base and the Simulation were from one group and Aria and the Soul of the Forge were from another. There was also a different type of connection between the Simulation room and Aria. I had a sense that as I gained more powers from a group, I would understand more about it. I was unsure for how long I would continue to gain new powers. I had the impression that though there was finite limit I wasn't close to it yet.

Before school I confirmed that the phones that I had spent some time the previous night were all working. Hacking the cell phone network wasn't within mine or Aria's capabilities however setting up a relay between phones and adding a layer of encryption to the calls was. A few paired phones would be hidden at random locations and if they were ever disturbed, they would be dropped from the relay network. This would add an extra layer of protection and hopefully save us money over having to continually buy new prepaid cards.

Just before leaving for school, I wondered if I could use the soft stick to give Aria direct cell phone access. Sadly, I would need a few minutes inside my electronics lab to program try that. I added it to my to-do list for the afternoon. If that didn't work, I'd have Aria rewrite the phone firmware to give her control of one.

On the bus my sister decided to sit next to me and give me advice on being a good boyfriend. Amusing and probably just creating more ammunition for teasing later. I listened, not that she gave me much choice in the matter, some of it actually seemed sensible. At least it was a tiny glimpse into what she thought was important. I refrained from asking how long it had been since she broke up with her last boyfriend. At school I gave her a little wave as I headed off to homeroom.

I was unsurprised when Taylor joined me in the music room at first break.

"Morning Taylor." I said to a short sharp drumbeat.

"Hi Sparky." She replied with a smile.

I was pleased to see that she actually seemed a lot happier today than I had ever seen her before. I was tempted to ask but I didn't want to break the spell.

"Your phones." I said as I handed over two of the cell phones.

I indicated the one that looked fairly normal if a little beat up, "That's your civilian phone." I indicated the other which was matte black and had a leather bumper, "That's your toughened cape phone. Able to take more of a beating. Both are set up to be hard to trace and relay through these." I pulled out three short lengths of cracked PVC pipe. "Each has two cell phones in it with an induction charger. They need to be hidden somewhere around the city and the little sleeve on a wire needs to be wrapped around a standard power line."

Taylor just stared at the collection of hardware for a moment, "Did this cost a lot?"

"Oh yeah, I spent at least ten dollars on that. Had to steal the broken PCV pipe though, that really would have blown the budget."

She rolled her eyes.

As I was putting the relays back in the bag a new power presented itself to me causing me to pause. This one appeared as a tiny spherical room with walls patterned with grey hexagons. A small, raised platform stood in the middle upon which a futuristic looking computer tower stood, the computer was mostly black and silver with a large blocky 'Null-Space Computer' across the base of one side. The room looked like a small version of Professor X's Cerebro with the computer standing in for Professor X. This I could tell was a computer that I could summon to anywhere and though it seemed very cool I was unsure what benefit it would give me beyond what Aria already provided.

"Another vision?' Taylor asked.

I nodded, "I'll explain after we finish going through your gear."

From the bag I pulled out a collection of tie wraps. "These probably cost more than everything else and I'll have to restock dad's collection at some point but he's got heaps. I have a bunch more that I want to try reinforcing with your spider silk." I looked at her and she nodded.

From her backpack she pulled out a shopping bag and extracted a collection of cloth and spools of thread. "Cloth samples and woven silk thread."

I took them and was instantly impressed by the feel and quality. "That's so impressive. I really want to see what I can do with these." I had to wrench my attention away from the samples.

I pulled out a collection of small rods. The body of each was a third of a coloured marker trimmed and capped at one end with a black stopper and capped at the other with a small piece of leather. "The red ones are the epinephrine. The blue are the antihistamines. Once I put together some anti-venoms I'll give them their own unique colour codes. And lastly."

I pulled out some more rods though these were made from a thicker brand of marker, "We have the offensive options. Bigger and with ridges so it's easy to feel the difference. Red here are your three to four second knockout anesthetics, note the different lengths, short for teens, small builds and anyone who isn't in good health, medium for your regular joe, and the long for your body builder, drugged up people or low level brutes. For real brutes either they won't work or you could try using a bunch. Orange scale the same way and a form of hallucinogen that will affect balance and coordination, might work on some that the knockout doesn't and will also allow you to communicate with them afterwards. They'll still be able to talk though they might have a few issues with pronunciation. They will however still be fully cognizant so don't drop your guard around them. They all work by high pressure injection out the leather end. Need to be touching skin or clothing to trigger." I returned those to the bag as well.

"I wasn't expecting anything like this." Taylor was watching me closely.

"Hey, I really enjoyed building all this. More than happy to be Q for… Bond, Taylor Bond agent 007." I finished in a terrible attempt at a British accent. "Fits better with my powers and you just wait till the next big reveal."

Taylor gave me a tight smile; I could see she had some reservations about this or something.

After a moment she asked, "Well?"

I shook my head with a smile, "Don't have time and it's a bit more involved. Might be able to show you at lunch time if we could be sure that we won't be disturbed." I frowned as I wondered how that could be arranged. I'd get in massive trouble if a teacher checked up on me and found the door locked with me in here with a girl and they did occasionally check in on me. They always seemed surprised to find me playing my drums rather than smoking or taking harder drugs.

"I can't prevent someone coming in but I could give us warning."

I pursed my lips, "How much?"

"About a minute unless they were running. I can track everyone in the school and will know if anyone is heading this way. This room is a bit out of the way so it's not likely we'd have too many false alerts during lunch."

"You can track everyone at the school at the same time?"

Taylor nodded, "Yep, and the surrounding blocks. My range is around five hundred feet or so."

"And how many of the bugs in that range can you control?"

"All of them."

"All of them? But there must be tens of millions."

Taylor nodded, "Over five hundred million actually. Most of them too small to do anything with but I can sense and control all of them."

I stared blankly at her, "Ever with some sort of buffering or… no not even then… no, there is no way there are enough neurons to handle that sort of processing. Oh hell, I guess it makes no more sense than my powers anyhow. But wow. You have an amazing power."

Taylor shrugged, "Just bugs, it's not going to stop Oni Lee, Bakuda or Hookwolf."

I shook my head, "I'm not so sure about that and I only wish I had seen them in action at some point so I could properly test that."

"What?"

"Oh… I have… well best to describe it as a thinker power where I can get an idea of a parahuman's abilities if I see them in action. I'll explain it properly during lunch. It's related to what I want to show you."

With that we cleaned up our stuff. Taylor wasn't going to be able to fit everything in her backpack with all her class books in there so we decided I should hang on to the relays till later.

We had Mr. Gladly before lunch and we were in a group again. Thankfully no Julie though we did have to put up with Greg. The exercise was plotting the interactions for a specific cape the group choose. Whereas my original plan was to act like my old self I couldn't really justify that with Taylor in my group.

I stumbled along the tight rope of being helpful whilst trying to act like I didn't care. I'm pretty sure I failed miserably as it ended up with both Taylor and Greg looking at me strangely.

For the first time I almost welcomed the distraction of a new power appearing. The room at first looked like a generic outdoor shop with bedrolls, tents and various camping equipment on shelves and hanging from the walls but I soon noticed a few unusual items, a tent that promised to house an entire mansion, backpacks with capacities in the thousands of litres, and ever-burning candles. My attention was drawn to the glass counter and sitting beside the old time cash register sat an unassuming leather bracelet. As it faded from the countertop, I felt it appear next to Aria's bracelet.

I almost jumped in joy. It was perfect. It was a SEP projector. A someone else's problem field. I had a vague memory of the term from a book that my dad had once convinced me to read years previously. No longer did I have to worry so much about what people saw. At the lowest level people would ignore most things about me at the highest I'd be all but invisible. Thankfully it seemed I could exclude people so I immediately excluded Taylor and noted her startled reaction.

Seemingly it had already decreased her awareness of me in the mere moments I had it on.

After gaining that I really did spend most of the lesson distracted by the new possibilities and putting in barely any effort into the class work. I'd apologize to Taylor after class.