Wow do I feel fucking stupid.
I had made the conscious decision to stay behind back there. Mostly because I wanted to see if I could pass the Protectorate information they would need in order to keep Whirlygig from joining the Merchants. Like I've previously mentioned, my merely existing was going to throw off the timeline, so it wasn't like I had anything to lose by going all in on the temporal fuckery.
A vast majortiy of my foreknowledge was based on characters instead of events anyway. As long as Bakuda existed for instance, she was going to be a crazy bitch. I felt confident that if by some miracle she ended up somewhere besides Brockton Bay, it would take her very little time to go ape shit and cause a scene. I knew Bakuda and her ticks and psychology better than anyone else, just like I knew about basically every important person in the city for the next few years.
So, in that light, depriving the Merchant's of Whirlygig just made good sense. It would take minimal effort on my part, and if the attempt failed then I hadn't really lost anything in the first place besides some time.
Even better, we literally found Whirlygig drugged up to her eyeballs and delirious. I wouldn't be surprised if the dizziness from her trip was a major factor in her resulting power.
It didn't take metaknowledge to make any of those connections. The woman had clear marks on her arm and was obviously unwell. All I had done was draw Armsmasters attention to it.
And wow, Armsmaster. My power lit up like a christmas tree when I saw the guy. I wanted to murder him and steal all his stuff within seconds of encountering him. He set off so many of my latent murder hobo instincts that for a second I nearly forgot where I was or what I was doing.
Ofcourse, that idea was stupid and therefore was to be ignored under the heading 'Conflict Drive Fuckery', but the point stands.
I had been expecting a lot from that meeting. Knowing the mans complete lack of a sleep schedule, I had given it even odds he or Miss Militia would have shown up for our call. So I had gone into things expecting a certain level of doucheyness.
If he had made his tone deaf Wards pitch at me, I would have had something to say. I had planned for that, and was even kind of looking forward to being flippant and dismissive about it. If he had tried to detain us on bullshit trumped up charges, I had a plan for that.
That plan was mostly 'Pain Gun and Run' but still. Heck, I had even been prepared for him to demand I had over some of my Tinkertech for whatever reason. He seemed like the type to think he could get away with that.
What I had not been expecting was for him to basically tell me that a gun that shot actual bullets might honestly be safer than the Mercy Pistol, followed by a lengthy lecture on the importance of understanding what my tech did before using it.
It should he obvious, but I never managed to do my flippant response to the Wards pitch he gave me right after that. I was too busy feeling stupid at the time.
See, the thing about Starfinder is that Non Lethal damage is Non Lethal damage. It just... didn't kill you. It couldn't kill you even.
Even now, I'm pretty sure that was true. I had just made one tiny little mistake.
I had been treating people as though they had health pools.
See, your average mundane gun should do roughly 1d6 points of damage. So, between 2 and 5 points on average. To me, the math looked something like this;
Your average person will die if shot a single time in the chest. Usually immediately, but sometimes from bleeding out. This meant that your average person must have roughly 5 points of health, give or take a few for build and body type. Bleeding damage started at 1d4 points of damage - which was about 2 points of damage on average, and accounted for outliers like people who didn't die immediately.
A Mercy Pistol did 1d6 points of Non-Lethal damage. I've explained before that I don't really know how that works considering it fires a laser - but it does. I'd seen that. Id watched Sophia unload on people without leaving a single scratch on them. I'd even caught the edge of one of those blasts myself and found it to be painful as all hell but not permanently damaging.
Here's the thing about that logic chain though.
Real people don't have health pools.
It was something I had felt vaguely niggling at the edges if my mind ever since I had realized how lethal Energy Ray could be. Energy Ray was a zero level spell. Mathematically, it should only hurt as much as getting punched. Well, getting punched by a very large man, but still.
It shouldn't under any circumstances be able to do a crippling amount of damage to a person. I just hadn't thought about it because well... I didn't want to. I didn't want to believe that I could casually murder people by pointing at them.
I mean, I know Worm is a fucked up place, but it was still a place with Superheros. If I had to be one, I wanted to be the kind of Superhero who would make Superman proud. I didn't want to get into the insane moral compromises this place seemed to love.
And really, I thought I didn't have to. I was the Overpowered Protagonist. I had the out of context power. The first thing I had ever built was a nonlethal weapon. I thought I could cheat.
The worst part a out this was that while I didn't natively know a single damn thing about medicine, my power did. I had just been ignoring it because it was blatantly biotinkering.
Because yes, Starfinder included a sizable amount of biotech. It was an area of expertise I had been consciously ignoring. Not because it was inherently dangerous, but because being a Biotinker was the next best thing to declaring oneself Satan in Worm.
The thing was, even if my Tinker power wasn't intended to provide medical knowledge, it kind of did anyway as a side effect. You couldn't surgically replace a persons stomach with a slug that made them psychic without the medical knowledge to do it without killing them.
And while I couldn't easily fake a PhD, the knowledge not being conscious, I should have a decent grasp on the basic mechanics of a human body.
Mechanics like shock,which had a number of unfortunate side effects, and which could be triggered by sudden spikes of extreme pain.
You know, like if someone got shot with a Mercy Pistol.
So fine, people are not Starfinder characters. I couldn't confuse my game knowledge with real life.
I could make educated guesses with that information.
What, you thought I was gonna get angsty over this? I'm a grown ass man, I can cringe over the situation, but I can only care so much about a bunch of thugs who survived anyway.
'So anyway, go for arms and legs for a while and avoid continuous or multiple shots.'I finished explaining to Soph as we made our way in a round about pattern towards our home.
'What about the balls.' She asked with complete seriousness. My legs twitched together in reflexive sympathetic pain, but again, Nazi's and Slavers.
'Should be fine.' I conceded.
'Good. Fuck Armsmaster. What does he know?' She huffed, and I was surprised to find her tone included a mild amount of betrayal. I guess that since she didn't know anything about the inner workings of the PRT, she might actually still respect the guy, at least a little bit.
I mean, in her whole predator/prey thing thing, Armsmaster would probably rank as an Apex Predator or something, at least just based on his published accomplishments. It wouldn't be surprising if she sort of expected some praise for her actions.
After all, she was trying to be a hero. It was easy to forget that amidst all the obvious sadism and brutality, but there were much easier avenues for her to go down if her only interest was in satisfying her urges.
'Eh, I should have thought of the Shock thing anyway. I'll do better next time.'I councilled, trying to mitigate things. I didn't particularly like Armsmaster, but only good things could come from Sophia respecting him.
'Whatever. Hey, you didn't tell me you had like a cape radar thing.' She brushed me off, changing the subject.
'John. I'm not fucking stupid. You knew I had powers right away. You knew that chicks deal, and I'm pretty sure she just triggered.' She pointed out smugly, leaving me briefly stunned.
It was really easy for me to forget that Sophia wasn't an idiot. She wasn't very talkative, and cerebral pursuits weren't her bag.
But she wasn't stupid.
Case and point, I'm pretty sure she just quoted me at me.
'Ah. Well. I don't have Cape radar. Not... really. Uh... call it an instinctive Thinker power? Sometimes I just know stuff."I deflected, while also leaving the door open for myself to pull knowledge out of my ass. It wouldn't fly with anyone who knew anything a out powers, because theyd start asking questions. Soph however...
'Mm.' Didn't give a shit and took me at my word.
So, we made our way home.
There was one good thing about the night. Those morons had some cash in their truck. Not alot, but if I was frugal, it would be just enough to finish my Mining Jack.
And once my Armor was working, then I could start to safely go hunting for more cash.
The city did have a surplus of criminals, after all.