"I want the ferry."

It was my first demand, and though I expected it to get denied, I also really, really, didn't want it to.

"The… ferry. As in, the out of use, no longer operable ferry currently sitting in legal limbo on the east docks of the city." William, who was sitting across from me, asked me incredulously. I liked William. Despite being the dickhead they had sent out to my Aunt in a bid to get her to sign me into the Wards, he didn't himself seem like altogether too much of a dickhead. Ultimately, he was just going where he was told and doing his job. He even acknowledged shortly after meeting me that he wasn't entirely happy with how things were proceeding - which was nice.

Still a dickhead though.

"Yes. You guys suck, you had to be bribed into protecting my neighbourhood, you used my attempt to help people at the mall to out me, andI want the ferry." I repeated much more adamantly.

I should like to note that I wouldn't have been such a ballsy little cretin if I was talking to, say, Director Emily Piggot. I knew better than to tweak her nose by being such an impudent shit with her when all it would do is set off her Cape based PTSD. It turned out, however, that when a problematic Cape gets scouted to the PRT, they don't automatically get shuttled into the Directors office to negotiate terms. Not only did the PRT have people whose sole job was managing that kind of thing, but putting a technically unaffiliated Cape in a room with the leader of the local PRT branch was apparently kind of a dumb move just in general.

"The PRT doesn't, nor has it ever, been in legal possession of the vessel in question." William pointed out tiredly.

"So make it a PR thing. Let me work on it, the city gets to keep using it, the Mayor gets free publicity for a public works project he didn't have to pay for." I countered immediately. William listened to me, barely restraining the urge to roll his eyes at me, before speaking up.

"I can pass it up the chain but it isn't within my power to guarantee or grant that." He responded smoothly, darting a look at my Auntie - who was the person that was supposed to be doing the actual negotiations - then back to me - the person who was actually doing the negotiating.

Which was for the best really. Once we had gotten past the fact that Gerard definitely wasn't a Parahuman, William had convinced Auntie to bring Sophia and I down to the headquarters for a meeting. I, assuming I was about to enter the legal battle of my life with the experienced battle axe who led the entire department, had thus had Merlin pull up every aspect of Cape law as it pertained to the Wards that I could manage. It wasn't hard for him - they didn't exactly hide it. In fact, there were digital brochures all over the place describing it in excruciating detail, many of them personalized to the department and state they were from. Turns out that when you run a public organization that takes care of children, people expect you to be fairly transparent about their treatment.

Who knew.

Regardless, sitting down with William now, I was much better equipped to negotiate inevitably being bullied into the Wards than my Aunt was. If I could have convinced her to just flip the PRT the bird, I might have given it a shot, but ultimately, if the PRT knew who I was, then so would literally everyone else. Oh, they probably wouldn't be able to just dig my name out of the PRT files, but they'd be able to follow the string of information that led the PRT finding me in the first place - which was about the same thing.

"William man, you gotta work with me. You literally outed me. My eyes got blown up today. Do you grasp how painful that is? My eyes got blown up today, and while I was trying to relax and sleep it off, you came to my home and outed me. You understand why that fucking sucks right?" I complained to the man pointedly.

"Right, the healing ability Gallant reported. I've been empowered to offer you a significantly higher starting pay if that's transferable or usable by individuals other than yourself." William said, bypassing my question to pick at the one thing in my statement he actually cared about.

Which was fine, because that was why I had said it.

"I seriously hate this diplomacy shit Merlin." I complained to my AI, because pretty much everything I was saying - barring a little flavour from yours truly - was coming directly from him.

"The only truly important aspect of your recruitment will be your initial budget and pay sir. You can easily circumvent the vast majority of any possible restrictions or limits otherwise placed on you." Merlin responded pleasantly.

This was one of those times when the fact that Merlin was essentially birthed on the back of the Bond movies really shone through. He was way better at negotiating than I was. It was actually kind of sad.

Useful, but sad.

We had found, during the short ride here, that a majority of what I knew and understood about the Wards program was well… wrong.

It was basically just a part time job. I mean, a part time job with slightly more chance of being exploded by Nazis than I'd like, but a part time job nonetheless. I wasn't expected to be on base for anything greater then the six hour period stipulated in my contract, and pretty much every possible thing I could be asked to do by the PRT fit in that six hour period. Lame PR patrols, conferences, parties, promotions for energy drinks, photoshoots - any random bullshit the PRT could possibly ask me to do fit in that six hour period, of which I worked four in a week - totaling twenty four total hours of time per week. Much like any other part time job, I would have a schedule to adhere to, and the days I would 'work' would change from week to week, but the basic rules still applied no matter how my 'shifts' were arranged across the week. I honestly suspected that the PRT at large, or at least, in Brockton had being fast and loose with those rules - but if they were it was only because the Wards in question didn't care, kind of like being asked to work an extra shift at your part time job. You could say no, but depending on how well you liked your boss and coworkers, you might not.

If it wasn't obvious, I planned on sticking as close to my minimum hours as possible, and I wasn't going to let anyone convince me to do otherwise.

Patrol wise, I wasn't supposed to be patrolling or doing any caping of any kind outside of my designated six hours with the Protectorate - but the only visible penalty for that was to bench me from patrols… also during those six hours. And really, if the only penalty for running a useful patrol was being stopped from running a useless patrol - I considered that an absolute win. What were they gonna do, ground me?

There was also all the shit we had pulled up about being a PRT Tinker, but frankly, it was so diametrically opposed to everything I understood about the organization that I didn't really believe any of it.

Hence my response to Williams' question.

"I dunno, even if it is something I can hand out like a pack of jellybeans wouldn't you have to run it past a review board or something?" I asked pointedly. William leaned confusedly away from me.

"You mean Armsmaster?" He asked for clarification.

"No, I mean a review board. You know, a group of eggheads whose job is to make sure the healing doesn't come with I dunno… super cancer, or mind control crud or something." I elaborated.

"So Armsmaster then." William repeated, turning to my Auntie the way he had any time during the conversation where he felt like what he was about to say would help her definitively decide to push me into the Wards.

"While not every department has access to a Tinker to overlook a Wards development, the ENE has Armsmaster - one of the top tinkers in the country - to look after your nephew. Periodic reports to him will keep him apprised of what John is producing and allow him to step in if he believes it could be dangerous to himself or others." William explained, sort of confirming my fears.

My major issue with the PRT - the only issue I had really, since most of the local problems were only problems when you didn't know about them - was that I wasn't interested in having to mail everything I built halfway across the country to be examined for safety before getting it sent back to me for use months after I actually built it. Every story I had ever read about the Wards had intimated this to be how things worked for Tinkers under the umbrella of the PRT. Every. Single. One.

And here William was, basically telling me that no such thing existed. And I still didn't believe him.

"Just Armsmaster?" I asked incredulously.

"Yes - the PRT has no reasonable way of examining the amount of Tinkertech it would have to on a national level for the process to be anything but a local spot check where necessary. As you well know, most Tinkers consider it extremely time-consuming just to maintain their own equipment, asking a group of them to regularly divert from their own work to examine someone else's wouldn't allow them any time to do their own jobs - being Heros." William explained to me slowly, clearly perplexed by how off-putting I found the concept.

"That does appear to be roughly the same as what I am finding using online resources, sir." Merlin confirmed for me, adding to how surreal everything suddenly felt.

"Huh. Okay - I can work with that." I admitted, turning to gauge Sophia's response to all this. She was in the room with me, but was mostly just fuming silently. She had slipped back into old habits when it became clear that we weren't going to lie our way around William and Auntie - becoming uncommunicative and angry. Trying to cheer her up, I bumped her with my knee under the table, and shot her a cheeky grin before returning to talking to the PRT Agent in front of us.

"Just to square the healing thing away, I can totally bottle that shit if the PRT is going to be upping our pay." I agreed easily.

"Your pay. Shadow Stalker hasn't actually begun-" William started to protest.

"We're a package deal. I get paid more, she gets paid more." I insisted, causing William to grimace at me.

"You realize that adding to her pay will inevitably lower how much of a bonus you receive." He pointed out.

Oh, poor sweet William. He didn't fully grasp the kind of person I was yet, I don't think. This wasn't about me winning. It was about the PRT losing.

"As long as the net bonus is greater than my original bonus would have been alone." I said, smiling thinly at him. First the first time, the Agent genuinely stared gobsmacked at me, no doubt because of how incredibly petty that was.

"...you know, you are incredibly difficult to work with." He finally admitted.

"Not my fault the local PRT is desperate for help. You pretty literally can't refuse to recruit me, and as I've previously mentioned, I had kind of a bad day, so here we are. Now, about the rights to my name and likeness, in addition to creative control of my Cape identity - I'd write this down because it will apply to Shadow Stalker as well." I started in, folding my hands on the table in front of me and interrupting William before he could actually comment on my change of topic.

"And I'm still not over the Ferry, so try to remember that."

"It's your one way ticket to midnight!" I yelled gleefully, stepping around the sizeable hunk of metal I was working on, making sure it was secure on the hook I had gotten Vicky to loop through one of the overhead walkways.

"Call it-" Vicky called back at me, grabbing a hold of the metal plate and eyeballing to point along its middle where I had used a marker to indicate where I wanted it bent. I'd have to do a bunch of other shit later to reinforce those bends given that we were just shaping the plating by main force - but god damn was it faster than what I'd have to do by myself to get it done.

""Heavy Metal!"" We both cried out in unison, matching the high pitched scream of Sammy Hagar as he belted out the chorus to Heavy Metal.

I had been going about everything wrong. I was stupid and bad, and I should feel bad about it. All the pieces were there, I just hadn't been putting them together in the correct way. See, as much as I fancy myself a Starfinder munchkin, I hadn't really fully flexed my powers to their fullest extent. I had been so caught up in the comparison to Starfinder, that I had ignored the areas where my power clearly differed from the way equipment and classes in that game normally functioned. In my head, I had built the Spell Core - a Technomancer ability - and my Exocortex AI Merlin - an Engineer ability - and the combination of the two at level three meant, to me, that I was a level two technomancer and a level one engineer. But that clearly wasn't actually the case. I didn't really have class levels at all. I was just faking it, and my power did that by giving me access to any object or tech based power from any class I wanted at my current level.

So right now, I wasn't a level two Technomancer and a level two Engineer separately, I was level four in both.

Even more importantly, I had been building individual pieces of equipment to their minimum level without really trying to eke any synergy out of them. The most innovative thing I had managed was cramming Merlin into my Spell Core, which wasn't even all that much of a big deal.

I had been so busy just building stuff to meet my immediate needs that I hadn't tried to bring it all together into a coherent kit.

But now that I was being forced to rebuild my entire loadout, and had Glory Girl to liberally fly large amounts of metal to me…

"Do you two ever shut the hell up?!" Sophia hissed at me, ghosting down from her self made obstacle course in her breaker state, then returning to normal just so she could snatch my cellphone off a nearby conveyor belt to turn off the music.

"Come on Soph, I know you don't wanna join up or anything but I think I've got us covered there. I should even be able to eke a weapons upgrade out for you before our contracts kick in." I offered her carefully. She was a lot more pissed about the Wards thing than I was. I wasn't happy about it, but I also saw how it could benefit me long term as long as I was careful.

Then again, I got the distinct impression her problem was less being recruited, and more being recruited by way of her mother not giving her any other option. Auntie was pretty adamant about that - and unlike Taylor and her father, Sophia didn't have it in her to just abandon her mother over something like this.

Still, I had done what I could, making sure we got the best terms possible - nothing like Sophia's original parole sentence - and getting the contract set to not actually go into effect for another week. A week during which I was planning on squaring away a bunch of Tinkering that the PRT probably wouldn't let me get away with.

Stuff like the walking war crime that was the be my next suit of armor, for instance.

"Fuck off and keep the volume down." She spat at me, barely stopping herself from slamming my cell phone back down hard enough to break it before sprinting away to continue her impromptu workout.

"Yikes. She is pissed." Vicky noted from behind me, the slight squeal of metal bending accompanying her voice as she bent the plate she was holding into the right shape.

"Eh, she'll manage. Just gotta give her a bit to calm down and she'll realize it's not really any different from what we were already doing. It's not like she isn't used to waiting around for hours while I work on my suit before going on patrol." I answered with a shrug before turning back to my work.

"I dunno, she usually at least humours you before flipping you off and walking away." Vicky said dubiously.

I considered that for a moment, before shrugging.

"Nothing I can really do about it. She'll come around - probably sometime immediately after I build her a really big gun." I mused aloud, directing Vicky to place the bent armor plate on a designated portion of my conveyor belt work area.

Honestly, I was so excited to be building my first set of true power armor that I was having a hard time feeling particularly down about anything else. It was kind of fortuitous that the PRT had found us to be honest. Beyond level four, I wasn't going to be able to reasonable build much of anything - I just didn't have the resources for it. Even the armor I was building right now, while still good only qualified as a scrappers rig by the Starfinder rules, making it some of the weakest Power Armor in the game.

Not that it would be weak once I was done with it.

See, not only was I going to fit multiple weapons onto the chassis of this baby, I was also going to get the extra mile and get the materials together to make Weapon Fusions for them.

Weapon Fusions were Starfinders answer to the classic Dungeons and Dragons weapon enchantments of yore. Dungeons and Dragons had a flaming enchantment - classic stuff. Starfinder had a Flaming fusion, which was similar but also entirely different. In Starfinder, a weapon fusion was basically a small object or knickknack you attached to your weapon that literally magically changed it.

They were also, because they were more 'magic' than 'tech', staggeringly easy for me to make. My first attempt at the concept was already sitting in a corner of the warehouse, waiting for me to finish my power armor so I could lift it. It had started out life as a worked hunk of metal on the end of a steel bar I had fitted to it. It was basically one step away from being some concrete on the end of a piece of rebar. Then I had slapped the Throwing and Returning Fusions I had made as a test run on the thing, and it had completely changed. Now the thing looked like a finely crafted dwarven relic, complete with intricate designs on the head and haft of the sledge hammer.

Yes, I had made a sledge hammer that I could throw and have returned to me. Yes I was going to call it Mjollnir. No, nobody could stop me from doing so. There was something appealing to me about appropriating a bit of the norse mythology the local Nazi shit heads loved to abuse. There's nothing quite like beating the shit out of someone with what should - to them - be a sacred object.

Also I just kind of thought it was cool.

Upgrades like this weren't hard to make, but they were hard to design - which is why I hadn't bothered with them before this. I had no time for it. At least, before I had gotten Merlin I hadn't. The AI had proved to be an easy hand at designing anything spell related - likely because he himself was basically an extremely smart spellbook.

Not just that, but it had occurred to me that I could abuse two separate aspects of the normal game rules in order to ensure I would never be without armor again. See, Technomancers could program their spell cores to be able to summon them across great distances. They could also effectively make any object into a spell core.

Ipso facto, I could make my new power armor into an upgraded spell core. I had to make one to get my second level spells anyway, and Merlin was happy staying in the weaker core I always kept on my physical person, so in the end, it all worked out.

Put it all together, and I was basically building a warmachine that carried a massive sledgehammer, was armored up to my eyeballs compared to anything else I had ever built, and would have two thunderstrike rifles built into its shoulders capable of launching me like my Jump Jets used to, or just generally firing lightning at anything that annoying me under Merlin's control.

Naturally I was going to call this loadout the Odinson - because what's the point of being dope and doing dope shit if you aren't going to be a geek about naming it?

"If you say so. Man, pretending not to know you at Arcadia is going to be rough." Vicky said, changing the topic.

"...Huh?" I asked stupidly, turning from trying to figure out what piece to get her to do next to staring stupidly at her.

"Arcadia? Where the Wards go? Because you're a Ward now?" She pointed out flatly.

"Oh. Oh fuuuuuuck." I hissed as realization dawned on me. Vicky was actually a year older than me so she was in High School already, and as she had previously mentioned, she went to the one school in the bay area that was still properly funded. Arcadia was basically the preppy upper middle class highschool, primarily because the PRT actively funded them in exchange for hosting the Wards.

Which meant that naturally, I would be expected to go there.

Which was kind of a kink in my original plans, because I had sort of been planning to go to Winslow - the poor people school - in order to look out for Taylor. I had no intention of really being around her that often, or of trying to get her caping, since I'd prefer she never trigger at all, but if she was bullied or something I wanted to be there to suplex whoever did it into next week. And that was just easier over all when I went to the same school as her.

"Well screw you too? You know I get if you don't wanna be seen with me in public after the Mall thing but-" Vicky griped at me, sounding slightly hurt.

"No I- it's a Thinker thing. I have to look out for someone that will probably end up going to Winslow for unspecified reasons." I explained far too quickly, lifting my hands into the air in mock defense of myself. Vicky took on a thoughtful look at that before frowning.

"Sounds weird. Girlfriend?" She asked innocently as can be.

So naturally, I laughed in her face.

"What? Hey stop- what's so funny!?" She spat at me in annoyance, zipping over to shake me by the shoulders.

"I just- I have so little interest in dating right now - the fact that the topic keeps coming up is seriously reminding me that we're all teenagers." I managed to get out between snickers.

"You're a weird guy John." Was Vicky's dubious response. Because of course it was. She was a fucking teenager. Fifty percent of any thought she had probably included the opposite sex.

"Yeah," I snickered a bit more before gently, shoving Vicky off me and getting us back on task.

"I try."

It happened towards the end of the week, only about a day before my Wards contract went into effect and I would have to start reporting to PRT headquarters four times a week. I was actually kind of looking forward to it, if only to get access to my own lab so I could spend slightly less time tinkering in an abandoned warehouse.

Taylor had finally gone to summer camp earlier in the week, and I had been fiddling with all the finicky electronics I had to get placed inside the Scrappers Rig to enable it to even move. A batch of Healing Ampoules was brewing in my chemistry set, and I was - quietly - listening to some classic rock instead of heading home for the evening - which I should really do. I was the only person in the fish packaging plant, Sophia having opted for as many local patrols as she could manage before the PRT sunk their claws into her.

"Emma Barnes will be finishing a photo shoot shortly." Merlin informed me, causing me to freeze in place.

I didn't know a whole hell of a lot about Emma Barnes and what happened to her in canon. I knew she got attacked by some Asian Bad Boyz goons (god I hate that name) on the way home from a photo shoot, and I knew that it happened while Taylor was at Summer Camp.

And that was all I knew.

I also, unfortunately, knew when all of Emma's photo shoots were - which was more than a little creepy if I was being honest, even if it was for a good cause. She was a surprisingly industrious young woman for someone not even in highschool yet, having upwards of two or three shoots a month for the duration of the summer.

Unfortunately for me, I had to try and be present for nearly all of them - because I had no idea which one would end up signalling the day she was potentially assaulted, thus leading to the creation of Skitter.

And today was the first of those many, many, stake outs.

"Fucking… I'm bringing the Hammer." I griped, throwing on my Junk Armor and ambling over to the highly ornate weapon leaning against the wall. It was surprisingly light for its size and make, allowing me to easily swing it up onto my shoulder before sneaking out of the warehouse. That was probably the throwing enchantment on the thing. All the magic really did was make it so an otherwise entirely un-aerodynamic object was light and accurate enough to be used as a proper thrown weapon - which had knock-on effects on the things overall weight, at least, to the person who was supposed to be wielding it. I got the distinct impression it would still weigh as much as a brick shit house to the person I threw it at.

Lacking my Jump Jets, I once again found myself jogging along the early evening sidewalks to get through the city. It was easily my least favourite part of Junk Armor - it didn't come with any kind of augmentation and couldn't possibly be equipped with one in a reasonable period of time because it was a strictly temporary construct.

As I jogged through the city streets - my destination was much further into the city so I was going to be jogging for a while - I made sure to keep an eye out for any trouble I might want to intervene in - or avoid.

Blessedly, by the time I got to the building I was looking for, I hadn't encountered anything of note. Honestly, the weirdest thing about the area was that it was nowhere near territory that was traditional Lungs - which made the fact that Emma Barnes and her father got attacked near here by specifically the ABB twice as confusing to me. I was just pondering the idea that the thugs might specifically stake out talent agencies like the one I was standing in front of in search of pretty girls to kidnap, when a side door on the building opened and I realized belatedly that I was just sort of.. standing in the parking lot. With a hammer. Menacingly.

"Emma stay back." Was the first thing I heard from the slightly rotund man that I presumed to be Alan Barnes - Emma's father.

My gaze snapping over to him, I realized that he had bodily pushed his daughter back into the building behind him and was already pulling his phone out to call the police or - more likely - the PRT.

"No wait, relax! I'm a good guy! I was just uh… the ABB have been seen around here recently so…" I yelped at him, waving my free hand anxiously in the air to get him to stop his phone call.

When he didn't bother I cursed and tried again, putting my hammer on the ground and lifting both hands into the air in surrender.

"I'm Starfinder! I'm. A. Goodguy!" I barked out.

This, it seemed, was enough to give the man pause.

"Aren't you a Polar Bear?" He asked suspiciously.

"That's a really long story," I said anxiously. Goddammit, I wanted my Jump Jets back. It was really fucking hard to loom unnoticed on rooftops when you had to take the sidewalk. I hadn't even considered the problem until I'd been spotted.

"Daddy you're embarrassing, he said he's a Hero!" I heard a girl hiss from behind him, and then Emma Barnes stepped out from behind him to eyeball me with naked interest.

Emma Barnes was… I mean she was just a redhead. I guess in a clinical sense she was pretty - clean face, no blemishes, classically beautiful features, etc etc, but mostly she just looked like any other teenager to me. I'm not actually sure what I was expecting the first time I met her, but it wasn't to be this… normal.

"So, you're not a Case 53?" She asked me curiously, though neither she nor her father made to leave the doorway they were standing in.

"Uh, no that was just a temporary thing I used to hide my identity when I got captured by the Empire this one time," I explained.

Actually, fuck, that sounds way more action hero-y than what actually happened. It made it sound like I'd made a daring escape instead of getting my ass whooped and then rescued.

We stood staring at each other for a while until slowly, I grabbed my hammer and started to back up.

"Well uh… anyway. I'll be around this area a lot. Because of uh, the ABB. So just… don't stop for anything on your way home and don't take any side streets." I offered lamely, continuing to back away. Man, not being famous sucked. It didn't matter if you were a Hero or a Villain - no normal person wanted to meet an unknown cape in a parking lot in the middle of the night. This was just a natural consequence of how I operated as a cape though. I rarely 'saved' people, so no one really knew who I was besides a few anecdotes here or there. An overwhelming majority of my actions had been premeditated assaults on Empire turf - not stuff a normal civilian would know about.

My stupid Wards announcement couldn't come fast enough.

"I'll keep it in mind." said slowly, his shoulders relaxing as I continued to move further away from him.

And that was how my first meeting with Emma Barnes went.

Really fucking awkwardly.