So, I had kind of lost a lot of interest in this after I took a break from it for finals, and I had found some major plotholes that really didn't work (see big, long ending author's note for a major one). On top of that it didn't have many reviewers, and it didn't seem like there were any more coming in. So...I didn't feel there was enough interest to make me too guilty if I dropped it, or to make it worth as much as I hoped for helping to learn how to write better. All this combined with the fact that this is more of an exercise in writing to me than anything else, so I didn't really plan out much of the plot beyond "this should/would happen at some point" for a few things, I was going to just give you what I had written and summarize what I had planned while shutting it down.

BUT then I decided that I might as well at least check to see if there were any more reviews first and, lo and behold, there were THREE more since I had stopped checking regularly. This inspired me to forge on ahead. Yes, the continuation of this story is due entirely to the 3 brave souls who cared enough to give some feedback. Your reviews MATTER, people! Review MOAR!

Of course, I had to rewrite most of what I had so far on this chapter, since half of what I had just didn't get anywhere in my mind's eye.

I changed Jacob's last name slightly. It is now Graft, instead of Grafter. I plan to retcon the earlier chapters for this someday, but for now I'm too lazy. Yes, I'm a horrible writer, and it shows all over the place. That is one reason why I am writing this in the first place though. The only way to become a better writer is to write, and to get feed back from other people on said writing. This is one of the most important secondary functions of fanfiction, with the primary ones being "Because no-one else can!""And 'Cause it's fricken' FUN!" -kudos if you get the reference-

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Contessa checked the Path to Victory once more before calling Alexandria. No changes to throw off the path. Scion's and Eidolon's recent actions weren't affecting the factor in question. Good. Her call went through and she immediately got down to business once she had confirmed that Alexandria was on the line.

"The Protectorate in Eau Claire, Wisconsin will be recruiting a new member tomorrow with a tinker specialization in implants and body enhancements. Find an excuse to be there as Rebecca, and while you are there meet and welcome him to the PRT. Suggest that he move to Brockton Bay to work with Armsmaster, as their specializations will work well together. Tell him the PRT would facilitate his move should he choose to do so because the Brockton Bay Protectorate has their hands full, while Wisconsin is pretty quiet. Offer him reduced official scrutiny of anything he does to himself as an incentive, so long as more thorough scrutiny is made of any projects he does for others. That will tip the scales enough for him to make the right choice. Questions?"

After a moment Alexandria asked, "Does this have anything to do with your instructions two months ago? Specifically, the instructions that lead to the death of Skeleton Crew? It was in the same general area, as I remember."

"Most likely. the new recruit being in the Brockton Bay Protectorate is a key part in several major paths. It will probably create some new problems, but he should be decent enough at cleaning up after himself. Once he decides, ask him to fly in to Brockton Bay over the weekend for a personal PR event at several local schools so as to introduce himself to the city. There is only one week of public school left, so he can come back to pick up any additional personal effects afterwards. It doesn't matter which schools he visits, so long as one of them is Winslow High. Have a part of the event be a drawing in which several random students get to meet and talk with him personally for fifteen minutes or so."

"Spelling?"

"W-I-N-S-L-O-W."

"Got it. Thanks."

Contessa ended the call and leaned back in her chair with a smile. She had just set up a few butterflies that would create some very large hurricanes in the future.

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Four weeks and change after Jacob's talk with his dad, followed by the reveal to his mom and each of his siblings in turn that the youngest of them was now a cape, the semester was over, and Jacob was going stir crazy. He had run out of enough materials to finish anything after his next project after the generator/parallator. Even after having scrapped the jury-rigged external parallator for parts, and even taking into account the extra money from tax refunds, this held true. His projects weren't cheap. He now had a minimal framework to install his future projects in, along with a low-tier overall body enhancement as a side-effect, but he couldn't complete any of the things he wanted to build into it.

That brought him here, to the most local PRT headquarters in the area, dressed in a fedora, a makeshift mask, and a suit that rarely left Jacob's closet. Not the best of disguises, but it did the job for the moment, especially when it turned out that the PRT's Chief Director Costa-Brown happened to be both on site and free enough to give him an interview herself on short notice. Jacob didn't imagine that happened often. The mask had come off by that point, and he was rather glad he had decided to go with something as formal as he did. Much the opposite of earlier when he had been let loose in a workshop full of materials for a demonstration.

The Director looked over one of the forms he had filled out in the lobby. "Jacob Graft. You say here you are a tinker with a specialty of tinkertech implants and body enhancements. Could you please clarify? Give me an example of something you have done already."

Jacob described briefly his generator before touching on his second project: power distribution. "In order to get the power from the reactor to any future implants I had to come up with something that wouldn't involve either damaging cellular tissue or extensive surgery throughout my body. What I came up with uses a sort of energy waveform that travels throughout the body which actually helps improve things a bit instead of doing damage. I'm less likely to get sick and just a little bit stronger and faster than I would be normally. This way I won't have to try and hard-wire power to anything new."

Director Costa-Brown nodded. "I guess I understood enough of that to see why things could get messy rather fast if you did, though it wouldn't go over well with the approval board. Tinkers have to go through a number of tests and an extensive approval process for anything they create. You in particular are likely to run into a number of problems getting approval for anything, considering your specialty. I might have a solution for that, but I want to know why you decided to come to us. You don't seem like you want specifically to be a hero. Explain your reasoning."

"Well," Jacob thoughtfully, "There's a couple of reasons I guess. I don't just want to make stuff. To turn myself or other people into supermen." Rebecca quirked an eyebrow at that as he continued. "I want to use the enhancements I make. It doesn't do me much good being able to do stuff if I don't actually do it. I want to feel what it's like to bend the world to my will around me, and this is the place I can do that legally and stuff without having to hide it."

"Well at least you're honest about it," interjected Rebecca.

Jacob snorted slightly in humor. "I guess. I've always been a bit of a cape-geek, anyway. That's only one reason though. I really can't afford to do much on my own, so I need a backer of some kind. My stuff is awesome, and I make it basically maintenance-free, but it costs a…well, a lot of money to make. You people left a good impression on me when I triggered, too. Alexandria saved my life, so there's that."

Rebecca felt a sense of vindication at that statement, but she merely nodded in approval. "Alright then. I'm glad she could be of assistance, and I know she would apologize for not being fast enough to avoid putting you through the trauma of a trigger event were she here. I did notice that you used some rather expensive materials making that thing in the workshop to demonstrate your tinker ability. Speaking of which, what will this do once you implant it?"

"Meh, it could have been worse." Jacob was feeling a bit more comfortable than he had at the beginning of the conversation. "As a devoted cape-geek I know enough to know that my trigger was pretty darn mild, so please tell her not to worry about it. As for the thing I made…" Jacob looked at the object in question on the desk where he set it down upon entering the room. It was about the size of an egg, but made primarily of a flexible tinkertech material similar to silicon and shaped rather oddly so as to fit properly in the right part of the human body. He grinned. "That's my introduction to the Blaster category. It'll create and direct high-energy ions as I want it to, particularly in streams. It wouldn't be restricted to that, though, because neural interfacing is awesome. Anyway, think beams of energy that range from 'burns you badly' to a bit beyond 'melt through a two-foot brick wall in half a second.' Assuming I keep to stuff small enough that it won't hurt me in the process. It won't really have a Manton Effect."

That made Rebecca frown. "That sort of lethality is not acceptable when fighting most villains." Jacob opened his mouth to respond, then closed it as she kept talking. "Please tell me why you should be allowed to implement something like this, especially since it poses some danger to yourself, as well."

"Well, if I don't have lethal options, then how am I going to do any good? People need to know that I can do some real damage, or they'll ignore me. Besides, what about Endbringer fights, or if I'm dealing with one of the villains that is acceptable? Plenty of parahumans have some pretty heavy artillery built in, and I can use it other ways too. If I make a disk of, well, let's just call it plasma for now; anyway, I could make a disk of it in front of me that vaporizes incoming projectiles, or stuff like that. I took the idea from something from Earth Aleph that I watched once. And I can't exactly put the Manton Effect into something I make. It's like a gun or a knife, or even a baseball bat. It isn't a power itself, just a device made with one. You can't make a gun that makes the person holding it immune to its bullets. That's what Gun Safety's for."

Rebecca's frown eased a bit. "Very well. I see that you actually thought this through, rather than just building whatever came to mind."

'Not really. Just common sense to me,' Jacob thought.

"I would like to give you a proposal," she continued. "This part of Wisconsin has very little to deal with in the way of villains, and the Protectorate here has a fairly good handle on things here compared to some other places. I would like you to move to somewhere that is a bit more pressed for help. Have you heard of Brockton Bay?"

Jacob blinked. "Um, wow. I guess that's a bit sudden for me. I…yeah, I've heard a little bit about it. They have a lot of villains there, right? Is there any reason you want me there in particular?"

"Yes," nodded the Director. "They have a great deal of villains, and not enough heroes, but one of the heroes they do have is Armsmaster. He is a tinker specialized in efficiency, and is particularly good at making things very small. I assume that you can see how his input could be of great utility to you."

Jacob thought for a few seconds. "I guess that is pretty obvious, but I'm not sure that I want to move halfway across the country to a place that violent just for that. Especially since you said that I probably would have all sorts of trouble getting my stuff approved anyway, so making it smaller might not be what I need."

"I'll see if I can come to a compromise regarding the approvals. Would you be willing to move in exchange for some special considerations for your tech, taking into account the difficulty of truly testing it beforehand? So long as you go through the full process first for any enhancements for other members of the team, testing copies of them thoroughly yourself while under observation, and sign a number of waivers, I can see to it that most, at least, of the red tape disappears for anything you do to yourself."

By the time she was done talking Jacob was nodding slowly. "That, I would move for. Is there anything else, then?"

"Yes, if you are willing to move to Brockton Bay. I would like you to perform a Public Relations event, ideally at some of the local schools, to introduce yourself to the city and give you a good first impression in the eyes of the public. However, the public school semester ends after this next week. Would you be able to fly there on Monday? You could, of course, return afterwards to pick up any personal effects that you weren't able to pack on such short notice." She was wrapping up the second to last of Contessa's directives, now.

"Huh. Well… Yeah, I suppose I could if you need me to. I made sure I was ready for some sort of change like this before coming here. 'Suppose I wasn't thinking of anything this major at the time, but if I can come back for my stuff afterwards I guess I don't see why not."

"In that case, Jacob, Welcome to the Protectorate."

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And Contessa makes her first appearance! She's not tagged in this story by mistake, no siree. This chapter was mostly about getting Jacob to Brockton Bay, and getting the inevitable entry into the Protectorate interview out of the way, while explaining/foreshadowing a couple of things. Not that I can really foreshadow effectively when even I have very little idea of where the story is going plot-wise, but hey. Also, we get another look at just how utterly OP this SI might get. His first implant beyond getting things ready is to completely replicate _There will be some sort of reward to the reader who guesses the character correctly first. PM me with guesses._ (EDIT: This Contest is now closed, as somebody has won it. See the note at the beginning of Interlude 1-b for more details.) Seriously, given enough time and materials, and maybe a bit of help from other tinkers, he could probably bring himself (or someone else) up nearly to the level of Buster!Taylor from Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower. That would be a looong way down the road, though. Let's hope I don't turn him into a Gary stu by accident, shall we?

Alright, so. Major Plothole. I mentioned in the beginning author's note last chapter a number of responses to the helpful input of FTomato. One of his concerns was the fact that the trigger event didn't seem to match the power. I have, since writing the last chapter, found an official description of what sorts of things result in what sorts of powers in a trigger event (Weaver Dice Rulebook, found at [ docs .google .com document /d /17WIAhETdtVGSKzFuDYOT2_6U_MMXmTGyzCziYhCwozo /edit#heading= ] Remove brackets at beginning and end, the spaces in front of each slash mark, and the spaces in front of the periods in front of "google" and "com" for the address once you've copy-pasted it into your browser bar for the link. make sure to add in the "htt ps:" and the "/" "/"in front. Sorry it's so convoluted, but it takes some Taylor level munchkining to make it understandable with the stuff they do on this site. Hopefully I didn't miss anything there.)

Needless to say, if there is one power category that I or my self-insert would absolutely NEVER trigger with, it would be the Tinker category. "Issue proves difficult to resolve, unsolvable problem, typically over an extended period of time (weeks or months)." That is the condition under which a Tinker triggers. I simply do not work that way. I am firm believer in Jesus Christ, and I trust that he will take care of any problems that I can't. He always has, always does, and always will. I have LOTS of experience with this for my age. If I can't deal with a problem, or even if I'm just not entirely confident in my ability to do so, I don't really worry about it. It always resolves itself somehow or turns out all right in the end. That kind of attitude makes for a lower chance of triggering, but not much in the way of lasting trauma from a trigger event. That is one reason I went with a trigger like the one I did, but it really doesn't work for a tinker. It could work for anything from a Mover (need to get away from the zombies), Thinker (Rapidly reaching a mental crisis point in the form of panicking from the zombies), Blaster (large number of zombie humans chasing, coming from a distance away), Shaker (zombies are somewhat "abstractly" human and "environmental danger"), Stranger (Attention from a group of zombies/Skeleton Crew himself causing panic), Trump (Other powers very much involved in trigger event), or maybe even Breaker (Metaphysical danger in the form of being turned into a zombie after death). If the zombies had caught up before Jacob triggered you could even throw in Brute (physical pain and damage), Striker (Zombies right in his face attacking him), and maybe Changer (Realization that he will never be the same again, even if he manages to survive somehow). With that, it covers every single category EXCEPT Tinker. Still, I wrote this the way I did, and now I have to deal with it.

Incidentally, the canon "Locker Incident" somehow manages to fulfil the criteria for EVERY SINGLE ONE of the trigger event categories in some capacity or another, depending on how you, or more importantly, how Taylor at the time, look(s) at it. Interesting, right?