"Amy calm down. I'm in a PRT van headed to headquarters - my transport was attacked by Merchants. Can you get Vicky downtown instead?" I asked quickly, mind racing.
I was already pretty stressed out on account of everything that had just happened, so Amy 'give you cancer for looking at her funny' Dallon being mad at me was definitely not something I was interested in experiencing.
Really, what I wanted to ask was why she didn't heal Vicky herself, and barring that, what the fuck she had biotinkered up on the spot to be able to fly anyone anywhere but I got the distinct impression that straying from to topic at hand would probably just piss the brunette off.
"No. You have to comehere." Amy quickly - too quickly actually - refused my request. There was definitely a certain degree of worry hidden by the anger in her voice that was putting me on edge.
"Amy, what did you do?" I demanded.
"Nothing! Just get here!" She snapped at me, before then immediately hanging up.
I worked my jaw for a second, trying to think of what exactly I should do or say to make this situation work in my favour. With my weapons down to zero charge, I couldn't use them for the jump jet functionality any more than I could use them as a weapon. I kept spare battery packs in the storage compartment of my armor, but I only had so much space to carry stuff and had already used them all up during the fighting. So my mobility was severely limited. I could probably use a Personal Gravity spell to get around but I'd have to break out of the van first and-
Wait what the fuck was I thinking? Was I stupid? Was my mind just stuck in fight or flight mode?
"Star Finder to Console, I need to detour to another location. Glory Girl is injured and can't be moved." I quickly radioed in.
There was a pause, and then Armsmaster replied to me instead of the agent on the console.
"This is Armsmaster. What is Glory Girls' current location?" He asked pointedly.
I hesitated but ultimately kind ofhadto answer the question.
"Her sister managed to get her to the abandoned building I used to tinker in. It's near my home." I offered with a silent apology to Sophia for giving up the location of our hiding spot to the PRT. I swear to god, Amy better have a good fucking explanation for this or I was going to visit evey torture Soph was going to heap on me back on her two fold.
"Negative. There is an active battle between the Merchant and the Empire in that area. Star Finder, return to base and give me the address, we'll have an ambulance pick her up."The console guy ordered.
I tensed and didn't immediately reply or confirm that I had heard him.
"Merlin, can we get Amy back on the phone or..?"I asked my AI urgently.
"I have been trying to do so sir. She isn't answering." Be replied simply.
God dammit Amy.
"Armsmaster, sir. I keep extra supplies there. I can rearm and be prepared to heal more people if you escort me. O-or you can take them yourself!" I asked urgently.
Truthfully, I didn't keep that much extra stuff at the fish packaging plant anymore. There were maybe… three vials of healing serum laying around somewhere, a polymorph and… I want to say a spell gem? The only thing of real use at the place was a bunch of extra battery packs I kept for when I wanted to do some extracurricular caping. Still, if I had to, I would just dump my personal supply of healing tech in Armsmasters lap and lie about it. I had used so much of the stuff today, and made so much of it that I doubted anyone could have reasonably kept track besides myself or Merlin.
The thing was, I really didn't want to piss anyone off by jumping out the back of the van and sprinting into the distance- but I absolutely would if I had to.
I think Armsmaster probably picked up on that. Or at least, misunderstood enough of my mental state to realize I wasn't in a good place to be fucked with at the moment, because eventually his stony voice came back to me over the comms.
"This is Armsmaster. I'll take point and lead us around the worst of the fighting." He eventually put forth.
I slumped in relief, not that it was noticeable to any of the troopers around me through my armor. I wondered if I should be concerned that Armsmaster of all people seemed to have the best grasp on what kind of person I was. Then I put the thought out of my mind. Maybe he was just better with people than I gave him credit for - hewasthe leader of the local Protectorate.
Still at least one thing was going right. I just had to get through this and then I could get out of my armor and catch some sleep.
—
"What the actual fuck?" Was the first thing I had to ask upon walking into my old hideout.
Armsmaster had been true to his word, and we had made all haste towards the place once he had plotted out a course around all the fighting going on today. Apparently my particular location had been one of the least dangerous to be in, or at least, had experienced the quickest ending to hostilities.
The rest of the Protectorate were still running around the city putting out fires and stomping out small riots. I had no idea what the hell the Merchants thought they were going to achieve, but many of the other attempted attacks on the PRT had dissolved into less focused bouts of looting and violence that had spread out over a wider area.
Which is about what I'd expect from an army of crack heads.
Regardless, I was glad that Armsmaster was holding off on getting into the fray for my sake. He had to be chomping at the bit to dive back into things.
Which was all entirely separate from exactly what the fuck I was looking at when I walked into my old workshop.
The doors that usually had stuff piled in front of them so only Sophia could ghost through and open them? Those had been bulldozed open. At first I figured that maybe Vicky had gotten it together long enough to muscle them open, but the damage was much more consistent with a large object ramming them open - like a car or something.
When I carefully stepped through the doors of the building - I had held Armsmaster off with some bullshit about disabling defenses - it was to find a… hell I don't actually know how to describe it. It was like a biopunk approximation of a Gryphon.
A normal Gryphon - and I say normal here in reference to depictions of the things in myth and legend - was a lion with the head and forelimbs of an eagle, and a wingspan that allowed the lumbering thing to fly.
What I was looking at was almost that. It had the Lion body down, but it was hairless. It had eagle wings that looked like they would be as wide across as an entire city street when extended - but instead of feathers it had these huge balloon-like pustules dotted along their length, which made it look like an angry plucked chicken.
When I entered its field of view, massive ophidian eyes swiveled towards me and the entire thing shuddered and hissed at me, spitting tiny droplets of acid across the ground in front of me.
Oh. Oh Amy. Why?
I got the immediate answer to that question when Amy - looking haggard and wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt like she had been jogging before this - stumbled into view, then swatted the thing on the side.
"She's this way." The brunette told me urgently, stumbling past the… thing… and grabbing me by the hand to drag me further into the plant.
I didn't move of course. I just stood still, the weight of my armor making it impossible to shift me with Amy's lack of upper body strength.
"Amy what the fuck-" I started to ask, only to be cut off.
"After. Heal Vicky first." She ordered me, and I shit you not her voice came from two places at once. The fucking Gryphon thing and her own mouth.
"Oh god that is so creepy." I mumbled, finally allowing myself to be moved inside.
"Here. Fix her."Amy demanded of me again once she had pulled me to the disused conveyor belt that Vicky was laying on.
Vicky had the same 'just going for a jog' look that her sister did, only the bottom half of her pants were soaked with blood, and she was pale as a ghost.
Her legs were also definitely not pointing in the right direction, which made my initial assumption that whatever had broken in her legs had probably clipped an artery or something. It was a small miracle she wasn't dead yet - which wasn't to say the possibility didn't still exist.
"Merlin." I quickly ordered, setting whatever the fuck Amy had going on for the moment in order to keep my friend alive.
After all, she'd have done the same for me.
"Enroute." He informed me, no doubt exiting the vehicle where I had left him and sprinting into the room.
"Armsmaster this is Star Finder - I need to perform emergency surgery in here. Hang tight." I quickly informed Armsmaster - out loud, so Amy could hear me - then turned to her while also quickly disengaging my armor so I could slip out of it. I generally wore a PRT issue generic body suit when I was in the thing, so I went from feeling sort of stifled to cold in a matter of seconds once my sweat drenched skin hit the outside air.
"Confirmed." He responded simply. I had to assume at this point that the Director had given him orders to stick around, probably because to her this was going to be a favour owed by New Wave, and was relatively safe to me personally.
I didn't really care at the moment however.
"You need to hide that thing." I informed her quickly while rushing over to my old chemistry set to grab a pair of scissors I typically used to open plastic packaging.
"Why?" She asked me, her tone somewhere between angry and worried.
I didn't bother gesturing at the monster as I spoke, instead running back over to Vicky to start cutting the bottom half of her pants open so I could get at her legs. Merlin quickly had Science Dog draw even with me, and it was a testament to how freaked out Amy was that she didn't even question the presence of the robot dog she had probably never seen before.
"Looks like some Biotinker shit. No one likes Biotinkers." I grunted as one of Merlins manipulators came up to begin injecting healing serum into Vicky.
This was kind of touch and go, all things considered. Unlike Starfinder - where injuries were purely measured in the form of hit points without regard for the nature of said injury - I had to deal with a few quirks from my own healing. For one, if I didn't set the bones in Vickys legs properly, then when the serum kicked in they would just heal in the broken position.
One thing serum was good for, however, was replenishing blood loss. So basically what I had to do was slowly inject enough into Vicky that she wouldn't die of blood loss - while simultaneously keeping the dosage low enough that I wouldn't have to constantly re-break her legs to set them properly.
I probably couldn't have done it alone. I definitely couldn't have done it without the free encyclopedic knowledge of human biology and the medical procedures pertaining to it that my power gave me. Knowledge that I wouldn't have if I was 'just' a Technomancer or 'just' an Engineer. For the first time I found myself heavily drawing on the knowledge inherent to the Biohacker class - which, in case it wasn't obvious, was almost literally the Starfinder equivalent of a Biotinker.
So you can probably see why I hadn't made it my primary focus.
"I- is she going to be okay? You can save her right?" Amy asked me instead of directly responding to my statement - though I did notice the Griffon thing start to sort of… fidget… where it was standing on the other end of the room. Frankly, if I wasn't so burned out from the rest of the day's events, I would probably have been a lot more distressed by its presence behind me.
As it was, I was just ignoring it.
"Yes. Now move your monster before Armsmaster sees it." I snapped, finally shearing through enough of the blood soaked cloth to get a look at what I was dealing with. It wasn't as bad as I feared, but it wasn't great either. Her femur had pretty much split into three separate pieces - one of which was stuck straight through the skin at an angle. The offending shard of bone had probably clipped her tibial artery, hence all the bleeding.
"I am!" Amy growled back at me. Again, I didn't bother responding, I had bigger fish to fry. The 'operation' as it was, was over pretty quickly. I didn't have to do much, I just had to work very fast. Which is not to say I enjoyed digging around in Vickys leg or anything, but all I had to do was roughly put all the pieces in the right spots before dialing the healing up. Once I was done that, I then immediately moved to my old chemistry set.
"What are you doing? Are you done yet?" Amy demanded of me, following behind me like a nervous mother hen.
"I was just digging around in your sister with my bare fucking hands. I need to cook something up to stop her from getting an infection. Amy. I love you, but please fuck off." I barked, causing her to jerk away from me, and for a massive shadow to cast itself over my workspace.
Irately, I looked up to find myself staring into the eyes of a giant fucking gorilla.
I'll be honest. I just about nearly shit myself.
"Amy,what the fuck?" I demanded again, nearly knocking over my chemical set trying to move away from the thing.
"You said not to look like a Biotinker!" She responded to me with an angry hiss.
"So you made a fucking gorilla?"I asked incredulously.
"No you ass, I made my power a gorilla!" She snapped back.
It clicked into place for me then.
"You're aMaster?" I all but cried out, turning back to the time sensitive task of cooking up something to make sure Vicky didn't get an infection.
"No! Yes- why do you care?"She snapped.
"Because Master powers come from feelings of isolation, loneliness, abandonment, and betrayal - you're not supposed to have one. You were supposed to get-" I stopped, whipping my head around to stare at her. She stared blankly back at me, like she couldn't comprehend a word I was saying anymore.
I panned my head to look at Vicky, who had been restraining her 'feel good' aura for over a month now, and had been spending increasing amounts of time with me and Soph until recently.
Okay so…maybe there was grounds for a Master power there.
"So what, you can make monsters?" I asked in worry.
"No! This is like… a benign tumour? I can feel it all the time. It's biology. How to change it, how to make it do what I need it to…" she trailed off, getting a glassy eyed look that coincided with the entire gorilla rippling like it was made of jello and then growing slightly.
"…make it better." She finished with a shrug.
What, so like, her old power but it only works on the projection?
Wait, did this mean I was going to be stuck at the hospital alone? Ugh. I had so many questions.
Yanking the vial of green fluid I had been concocting while we spoke of the conveyor belt my kit was on, I set all of that aside in order to rush over and pour it down Vicky's throat.
Then I released a sigh of relief.
Her skin tone was already back to a normal rosey pink, and her breathing had evened out. Her legs were healed, and the Drone detected no sign of complications from anything we had done.
One problem down. I glanced at Amy who was standing less than a foot away, staring at Vicky like her life depended on the girl's wellbeing.
Many more to go.