Heres a fun fact for you.
Making a working laser rifle out of stuff from a Radioshack, plus whatever I could find around the apartment, was hard.
I don't know who specifically it was that lead me to believe that this kind of project was something I could complete in a single day, especially under adverse conditions, but they were absolutely wrong.
Also, Radioshack still existed in this nightmare world. It doesn't get more bleak than that.
My first two projects were things I tried to work on in tandem.
For one, as much as I generalized the weapon I was making for Sophia as a laser rifle, the finished product wouldn't actually be a rifle. It would be a pistol.
I had judged long ago that giving Sophia fucking Hess a weapon more lethal than a mundane crossbow was a bad freaking idea. I had never, at any point, considered the idea seriously. Instead, what I was trying to build was a little something called a Mercy Pistol. I could wax poetic about the lore and significance of the damn thing to the religion it originated from in the Starfinder universe - but none of that actually matters so I won't.
The Mercy Pistol and all its higher level variants fired beams of light that technically did fire damage. So in that sense, they were absolutely freaking lasers. The flip side to this, was that the beams a Mercy Pistol fired not only didn't, but couldn't cause lasting damage. Getting hit by one would feel exactly as bad getting shot at by a normal, lethal laser weapon, but instead of dying from a massive cauterized hole in your chest, you just sort of blacked out.
Hence, Mercy. 'Cus they chose not to kill you.
In my esteemed opinion, the Mercy Pistol was basically the perfect weapon for Sophia. It was obnoxiously dangerous, caused extreme pain to her targets, and prevented her from going to juvie on murder charges. Sure, there was probably something in the geneva convention somewhere about weapons like that, but given what I knew of Sophia's possible future, I'd take what I could get.
Plus you know, making literal Nazi's feel like they were burning alive tickled a part of my hindbrain that I found pleasing.
Note to self, try to find out if the Geneva Convention exists here.
The second project I was working on was my Spell Core. Technically, this entire build process would go alot faster if I made the Spell Core first, then used all the accompanying casting capability that came with it, to make Sophia's weapon.
The thing was, I had asked Sophia to show me the ropes as it were, and she had in turn chosen to abstain from doing anything Cape-y until such a time as she had her new weapon in hand. Sophia, for all her issues, was amazingly competent at navigating the city and beating the shit out of people. I wasn't so narcissistic as to think I could easily match her in that field jusy because I was mentally older.
So, instead Soph ended up dedicating the time she would otherwise have spent working her aggression out on Nazi's, by helping me with my physical conditioning.
So yes, I had spent the last two weeks being run up and down the neighborhood like a god damn dog. Sophia was fairly merciless about it too. She didn't do 'breaks'. She also didn't let me escape her either. I had fucking tried. When school let out, she would find me, and make us run home. When we got there, she would make us run up the stairs - too the top of the fucking building. We lived on the second god damn floor.
Apparently she considered the walk back down the stairs - yes, still no elevator - a good cooldown excercise.
So yes, I was doing my best to hustle out the woman's god damn laser pistol. I think I might literally die if she woke me up at five am to go sprinting around the block like a madman one more time.
Honestly, while it was interesting to see the ridiculous process that lead to Sophia being such a capable fighter, despite not having a power particularly well suited to melee, it was the exact opposite of fun to have it take up nearly all my free time.
That was literally my life now. If I wasn't at school I was running, or doing push ups, or squats or whatever. If I wasn't doing either of those things, I was groggily trying to engrave spell matrices on the crap quality quartz I'd gotten from the market. See, I had chosen to bypass my material concerns with a nifty little spell called Fabricate Scrap.
Fabricate Scrap was a Zero Level spell, which were the only spells I could cram into a spell gem currently, and served the sole and simple purpose of turning roughly ten pounds of any inert material - I had been using garbage bags scavenged from the compactor room in the apartment - into a equivalent weight in scrap. Scrap electronics. Scrap metal. Etc etc.
The rules for the spell were such that the stuff was described as being useless for the purposes of building anything with, but I didn't need the stuff for parts. All the internals of my gear were being put together by me separately wherever possible. No, I just needed a way to get ahold of spare metal without visibly spending any time doing the incredibly obvious action of scavenging scrap metal from around the city.
Honestly, it was no small wonder that Tinkers were so rare in Brockton. They probably all got murdered within weeks of triggering.
My home life for the last couple of weeks had been somewhat less than ideal. Gerard hadn't beaten me again, but he clearly didn't much care for me either. We didn't really talk to one another, and that was just fine by me. I'm not really one to casually consider murder, but the concept of an adult man beating the shit out of a child for really any reason had my power supplying me with all kinds of interesting ways to do just that.
I only found out later from Terry that he had backed off because Auntie had explained that they were getting paid from a fund my parents had setup to look after me.
A fund that they wouldnt be getting anything from, if a social worker had occasion to take me away from them.
While the knowledge that I could screw Gerard with a phone call was nice, I wasn't willing to be separated from the Hess siblings quite yet - so Gerard and I defaulted to a sort of cold war state. Auntie tried to paper over it, mostly by pretending nothing had happened despite the fact that my black eye had only just finished healing recently. She seemed like she wanted to take care of me, but was much too invested in whatever she had going on with Gerard to tank it for a kid that wasn't even her own.
Terry was aloof most of the time. He looked out for me and Sophia when he was around, but he mostly did that by directing Gerards ire towards himself whenever he looked like he was going to get violent. He didn't really try to be my friend or anything. It wasn't the most comfortable feeling to know my older cousin was perfectly willing to get beaten for me, but didn't particulalry care to talk to me. Still, looking back on things, I can't recall being super friendly with anyone nearly five years younger than me when I was that age either.
Sophia... spent nearly every waking moment breathing down my fucking neck. I think she might have started to doubt my credentials as a Tinker even, until the first time I had transmuted garbage into scrap metal. After that, she was still breathing down my neck about wasting time and excercising, but it was mostly in an anticipatory fashion. It was kind of scary watching her frustrations rise as she continually abstained from going on patrol to train me. It was like watching her Shard manipulate her in real time. I would liken it to the way someone trying to quit smoking can get progressively more grouchy, only it was so, so much worse than that.
See, as we had gotten closer, Sophia had deigned to hang around me in our free time at school, mostly during lunch times. I wouldn't mind that, except that where she had started out sullenly eating lunch near me and ignoring anyone who chose to talk to me during that time, she had slowly shifted to making angry jabs at anyone who came within ten feet of us.
At this point no one even tried anymore.
Mind you, that worked fine for me. Sophia's inherent bitchiness was the perfect excuse not to have to pretend to be a vapid teenager. But it was still quite concerning.
Which brings me to now. Two weeks and change later, I had finally, finally, finished both my builds. The Mercy Pistol - which looked janky as hell until I gave it a cheap black paint job to cover up the crap materials it was made out of - rested carefully at the bottom of Sophia's backpack, and my Spell Core was wrapped around my left forearm.
There were a lot of forms a Spell Core could take, but at the heart of it, a Spell Core was an advanced computer that worked by connecting a bunch of spell crystals together into a functioning set of hardware. The crystals shared the load of casting the spell, allowing them to cast without shattering like a normal Spell Gem did.
As a result, a Spell Core didn't really look like a traditional computer. Mine, for instance, was a spiralling loop of coppery metal inset with just over a dozen hunks of quartz. It was the worlds most hideous bracer. I didn't love it, and wanted to replace it with something better as soon as possible, but for my purposes it was good enough.
Currently, Sophia and I were on our way to what she affectionately referred to as her hideout. Once more harkening back to her desperate need to be a batman wannabe, she seemed inordinately proud to show me the place, even though it just turned out to be an empty fish packaging plant. It was big, I guess, at least.
We headed around the rear of the building, where Sophia ghosted through the wall while I was left outside to wait. She had apparently long since barricaded the doors from the inside, making it all but impossible to get into the plant without her powers. Now she had to go about the arduous task of moving all of that crap out of the way to let me in.
While she did that, I had to resist the urge to fiddle with my brand new magical supercomputer in public.
Spells were, unfortunately, something I had to craft. The Spell Core didn't just come with a bunch of them preloaded. From a certain point of view, each spell I could cast was basically an App for the thing. Since I had spent almost all of my time just building the device, I hadn't had altogether too much time to program anything into it. Fabricate Scrap was in there, since it was the spell I had arguably used the most at this point, along with Energy Ray - which I had been forced to figure out so I could accomplish some welding - and Junk Armor. Junk Armor was the sole combat spell I had added after the fact, mostly because I had long since realized that I was going to end up going on patrol with Soph, and probably wouldn't have time to build a hardsuit before then.
Junk Armor did one thing, and one thing only. It grabbed whatever was around, and flash warped it into armor for me to wear. That armor would contain the basic amenities required in space - cheap environmental protections mostly - and was otherwise not ideal as far as armor went. It lasted for twenty four hours, and that was about it. Basically, it was Mush's power on a much smaller scale.
It was a stop gap and nothing more, but it was a stopgap I was going to need.
I still had room in my current Spell Core for a few more spells, but I would have to program those spells first, which was a pain.
I found myself drawn from my musings by the sound of the door to the building opening behind me, a sweaty Sophia glaring at me for having the audacity to be relaxed when she was working.
"Hurry the fuck up, I don't want anyone to see the door is open." She bit out at me, grabbing me by the arm and yanking me into the building.
It was... well it was a fish processing plant. There were conveyors all over the place, a bunch of overhead walkways that no doubt served some alien purpose known only to the fishing industry, and a host of large vats throughout the open floorspace.
There was a distinct lack of functioning machines I noticed, which made sense if the company was trying to cut its losses and moved them elsewhere when the cities economy collapsed.
Not a lot of need for a fish packaging plant when there were no fish being uh.. fished.
I could see a couple places where Sophia had added things to the place, most notably a bunch of ropes hanging from the overhead walkways with pieces of paper attached to them as targets.
"Does this thing have a safety?" Sophia asked me, distracting me from my examination of the room.
I was going to say 'no', followed by a short moment to berate myself for not putting a safety on a fucking laser pistol, but Sophia chose that moment to swiftly raise and fire the Mercy Pistol at one of the hanging paper targets.
There was no sound as the weapon discharged. No telltale blaster fire noise like from Star Wars. Just a brilliant lance of white light that was there and then gone in the blink of an eye. It would probably be extremely disorienting at night time.
"Must have missed." She muttered, eyeing one of the paper targets and then taking aim again.
"Christ Soph, why? I already told you, that thing can literally only hurt people. It wouldn't leave a mark on those targets." I explained for the umpteenth time.
Again, I have no idea how that worked, but it did, and I wasn't going to mess with it.
Sophia, charming gal she was, decided ignore my staement, instead walking out to the middle of the cleared floor space so she could keep practicing anyway.
Say what you want about her, but she's dedicated.
She also clearly had no idea how to hold or fire a pistol, particularly one that lacked recoil.
Grouchily - I'd been getting maybe four hours of sleep a night for weeks now - I walked over to her to explain what she needed to know, before starting up my own preparations.
As much as I had been using Energy Ray to spot weld stuff, its actual purpose was as an attack. Not a particularly strong attack - its damage in the rulebook would be about half as much as Sophia's pistol - but it was the only attack I had.
Carefully, I tapped a sequence out on my wrist, then watched as my Spell Core lit up. Complex equations filled my mind as the Core came online, and I mentally prodded the part of the equation that dictated what flavour of damage the ray would come out as. Ice was the easiest, and least likely to blow something up by mistake, so that was what I went with.
Then I pointed a finger at one od the targets, and cheered when a frigid ray of ice froze the thing solid.
"Fuck yes!" I yelled in glee. I had beem working on this stuff for so long that the sheer joy of being able to shoot lasers from my hands hadn't set in until I actually fired one. Suddenly reinvigorated, I quickly checked over the Core for damage. A zero level spell shluldn't tax the thing at all, but I still took the time to check all the gems set in it for fractures or damage.
When I found none, I looked back up with a feral grin, and joined Sophia in unleashing unholy hell on those little paper targets.
Surprisingly, since we were sharing the same targets, we found that wedidhave a way to judge if Sophia's attacks were landing. The heat from the Mercy Pistol's beam was apparently enough to melt the ice my own attacks left on our targets, leaving soggy ripped paper in its aftermath.
This allowed us to quickly fall into a rhythm as Sophia worked her way through all the ammo I had designated for practice. The Mercy Pistol literally ran on batteries, so I had Tinkered up three power packs Sophia could rotate through while the other two charged. Not that we could charge anything here. I don't think the building had any electricity.
"Hey Soph?" I asked tentatively while we were on our seventh round of freeze-defrost-replace for the targets.
"What?" She asked, her tone surprisingly light. I guess she was in a good mood.
"Why don't you join the Wards?" I asked tentatively, wincing even as the words left my mouth.
Counter to my expectations, and possibly because of the aforementioned good mood, Sophia looked like she had to think about it for a second before answering.
"They don't do anything." She stated flatly. She wasn't angry about it - probably because she hadn't been subject to the PRT's whims yet. It was just a statement of pure fact.
"That seems unlikely. They've got the resources and manpower to be pretty effective. It is kind of their job." I pointed out, trying for devils advocate.
I, of course, knew that the Wards were a useless PR stunt. At least in this city. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think Sophia could benefit from meeting the other Wards on better terms.
"Have you seen one patrol in our neighborhood since we got here?" She asked rhetorically, a sneer on her face.
I thought about it, then answered.
"No, but it's a big city." I pointed out.
"It ain't that big. I used to be able to go downstairs at ten oclock sharp and be able to find a half dozen drug dealers within a block of the apartment." She explained, getting up from where she had been waiting for me to finish my turn and taking a firing stance that was noticeably better than when we had started.
"Used to?" I asked, already knowing the answer to my question.
"Yeah." Sophia stated with a vicious grin on her face, rapidly plugging targets like she'd been doing this her whole life.
"Used to." She affirmed.
Well. That wasn't chilling at all.
Still, the conversation and mutual blasting session seemed to have sort of thawed something in Sophia. She seemed alot more open to casual conversation than she had been before. I wouldn't say she trusted me really - it had only been two weeks after all - but the seeds of it were there.
We spent some more time chatting, mostly about the local villains, but occasionally about other things like TV shows or music, then packed up and headed home when it got too dark to see inside the factory.
I looked down at my Spell Core, hidden beneath my sweater sleeve, then at my cousin in one of her rare good moods, and smiled.
Progress had never felt so sweet