If Taylor had been the one walking, she would have stopped still when she heard Betta's last statement. Roland threw a magical nuke at a god? The implications of that, now that he was here, were amazing. He could potentially take on an Endbringer and win, perhaps all of them if Behemoth couldn't control magic as well.

Betta, seeing this train of thought, was quick to put a stop to it. "Slow down there, Taylor. He could only do that in the game, and although I somehow have access to my full potential he most certainly does not. The rest of F6 knew that he could do magic, but from what he told us he was far weaker than in the game. It took everything he had to keep me alive until I got here, and I don't even know if his unique talents carried over from the game."

Internally, Taylor frowned in disappointment. Perhaps she had been a bit too hasty, expecting someone from another world to magically solve all of their problems, pun not intended. The knowledge that he could, perhaps, become strong enough to do so was motivating regardless.

As they walked through the town, Taylor gave Betta a brief overview of the layout of the districts and the gang territories. The older man took everything in stride, giving a few comments about the situation from his experience managing Wetlands City. He also told her about the town he had grown up in, which from all appearances seemed better than Brockton Bay although that was a very low standard to beat.

The two of them reached the docks ten minutes before five, and took a seat on a nearby bench as they waited for Miss Militia to show up. While they sat there, Taylor noticed a few things about Betta's manifestation that had passed them by so far. She couldn't feel the breeze that was clearly affecting the trees and litter nearby, and the feeling of the bench beneath her was missing. More than that, now that she was looking through his manifestation she could see several pillars of golden light poking through the water on the horizon, something Betta described as his ability to find unclaimed wealth. It was tempting to know that there was so much money out there, but the knowledge that she had no way to access it was frustrating.

Her introspection and silent conversation came to an end when the familiar figure of Miss Militia rounded the corner and began walking toward the docks, her eyes scanning the area briefly before catching sight of her. The heroine's pace was slightly quicker as she walked over to Taylor, who stood up as she approached.

"It's good to see you here. Is the blue armor your power?"

Surprised at the question, Taylor shrugged her shoulders and was surprised when Betta's copied her intent a fraction of a second later. Putting that aside for later, she thought the words she wanted to say at Betta.

"Kind of? It's the only part of my power that I've really tested out but I have a pretty good sense of what it should be able to do. I didn't want to break anything or set it on fire, and it's only been a few hours since… since I got them."

Miss Militia nodded in understanding. "That's very responsible of you. Before we get on the ferry, there are a few things I need to make clear. Before you sign anything, your identity is protected. Since you can't sign anything as a minor without your parent's or guardian's consent, we recommend using an alias while touring. Should you join the Wards, that alias is subject to change and you will need to disclose your real identity to the PRT. I know it hasn't been long, but do you have any placeholder names?"

The decision was instant. "Betta."

Raising one eyebrow at the quick response, Miss Militia put one hand to her ear. "Console, this is Miss Militia. I have made contact with the new parahuman, chosen alias 'Betta'. Both of us are at ferry point A, ready for departure to the Rig."

Taylor couldn't make out the reply, but while she was waiting she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. A rather nondescript man on the far side of the street had his phone pointed towards the two of them, typing away madly before putting it back into his pocket. Noticing her faceless stare, he flinched back for a moment before giving her a thumbs-up and scurrying away. If nothing else, Taylor felt that it would be a safe bet that word of Miss Militia bringing a new cape in to the PRT would be making the rounds on PHO by the time the boat arrived to pick them up.

"All right, Betta, our ride should be here in a few minutes. We'll probably have time for some power testing and an introduction to the Wards before the last boat back to the mainland. Could you give me a brief description of your powers so that they can prepare the appropriate testing devices?"

Betta spoke up. "Aside from the whole glowing armor thing, I can breathe fire but I'm not sure how much or how far. I might also have a stranger rating, because I got home from… I got home without anybody noticing me, and I looked awful. I don't think it's very strong, because it's always on but you noticed me right away. I might be a tinker, but I don't think that's easy to test, and I get the feeling that I might need to own land for my shaker rating to have any effect."

Miss Militia blinked once. "That's quite the range of abilities." Putting her hand up to her ear once more, she continued speaking. "Console, this is Miss Militia. Please prepare flame-resistant blaster testing in room B1 as well as Brute testing. Verification code Charlie-delta-niner-delta."

Another unintelligible response from the other end, and the two of them waited until the boat arrived. Their ride to the Rig was awkwardly silent, neither of the two of them having much to say to each other. When they arrived at the offshore facility, Miss Militia took the lead once more as they walked through the winding and confusing hallways.

Arriving at a room labelled "B1", Miss Militia held the door open, allowing Taylor to enter the room first. There were a few people in the room already, wearing a strange combination of lab coats, welder's masks, and respirators, each armed with a fire extinguisher as well. Once none of them were standing in a cone in front of her, she closed her eyes and inhaled, focused on the feeling of fire. Betta's movements were getting closer and closer to real-time reactions to her thoughts, following along less than a tenth of a second later.

She parted her mouth, opening her lips just enough to blow out a candle, and exhaled. The stream of fire reached the far wall in moments, flickering fruitlessly against the metal. While she maintained the stream, slowly running out of breath, she noticed the scientists in her periphery checking the readings on several devices and scribbling down a few notes.

When she ran out of breath, the scientists around her began checking their data with one another. Her mouth was warmer than usual, but nothing hurt and she had a new idea for what she wanted to do. Once everyone was behind her entirely and ready, she opened her mouth as far as it would go and exhaled while thinking of fire. Even through her closed eyes, she saw the room fill with fire.

With nothing better to do, Roland was going through his spell repertoire and casting everything he was capable of to see what still worked and what didn't. The water-summoning failed, which was to be expected seeing as he was attempting to summon it across worlds, which likely had a higher degree of separation than even summoning between his original earth and Falan. Oil-summoning failed as well, which confirmed the theory of separation.

After layering body-fortification spells for nearly five minutes within the zone of the magic power affluence, he cast the sugar-making spell and was rewarded with a handful of sugar. The backlash from the Lesser Benediction formed within the spell was negligible, but when he couldn't simply resurrect from his mistakes it became far more important to take precautions.

Another two snaps formed a large stone bowl, and several boosted casts of his sugar-making later he had nearly a kilogram of sugar in front of him.

It had taken most of the day for him to get even this far, and though the eight slowly-forming magic bricks spread around the room would be well worth it in a few weeks he couldn't exactly do much with only sugar. If there were more useful things he could do he would have, but he simply didn't have enough data to work from.

A small amount of math and observation confirmed that if he was in Canada, he was in one of the more northern provinces. The plants and animals nearby were unfamiliar to him, and if any of them could be used as magic materials he could have a path to enchanting his equipment. The ground was coated in a layer of snow, nearly half a meter high in places outside the town.

For now, he was waiting inside his house for Nicholas to get back to him with a computer. He had made a deal with the town that he would re-pave their roads and help construct buildings in the future in exchange for them facilitating his purchases in the nearest city, Whitehorse.

His presence brought mixed reactions from the town's residents. Several families wanted nothing to do with him, seeing him as something unnatural and having moved away from the more densely populated cities to live a peaceful life. Others appreciated him for his work, but otherwise didn't want to do much with him. The town's government, as it was, was willing to work with him, but held the same reluctance to approach him.

Nicholas, on the other hand, had become the only person living here to try and make friends with him. He had come into the house while Roland had been imprinting magic models onto the walls and made small talk, asking him about what he planned to do for the future. He had kept his answers vague, talking about the need for more information and research before he could make any hard decisions.

The children of the town loved him. He was the magic man, and apart from entering his house they followed him around to watch as he cast Stone to Mud and Mud to Stone while repairing the roads, each Hand of Magic or Prismatic Spray met with cheers. As happy as he was to receive the positive attention, Roland was a reclusive person by nature and preferred to be on his own.

While he was thinking, the sound of one of the few cars in the town approaching from the distance reached his ears. With a gesture, a nearly-invisible spider appeared and skittered out of the house, moving down the road to catch a glimpse of the car's driver. Fortunately for his encroaching boredom, Nicholas was driving the car.

He moved the bowl of sugar from the floor he had been sitting on to the table underneath one of the windows and stood up, stretching his arms and legs before walking to the doorway. When the car passed the spider on the road, he let it disperse. One minute later, a blue minivan pulled to a stop in front of his house. Nicholas stepped out of the vehicle, a box in his hands as he walked towards Roland.

"One laptop, as requested. I'm still curious as to how you're going to power it, especially – sans electricite, mon ami. J'espere que-"

He was cut off by a snap of Roland's fingers and a flash of light. "My apologies, Unhindered Communication picked a rather poor time to fade away. I think I missed part of your last sentence, if you wouldn't mind repeating it."

Nicholas smiled. "It's no problem, Roland! I was saying that it would be hard to power it without electricity, and I hope that it won't be dangerous."

Roland nodded. "If you'd like, you can come in and watch me do it. It's rather simple in theory, if much more difficult to put into practice."

Turning back inside, he heard the sound of Nicholas's footsteps behind him. Two more snaps of his fingers, and a table and two chairs rose from the stone floor of the main room of the first floor. He took one seat and Nicholas took the other, and then they spent a minute working their way through the packaging.

Once they had finished and the boxes had been deposited in a newly-created trash can, Roland snapped his fingers once more and a block of stone extruded from the table, snapping off in his grasp. He worked as he talked, carving a magical array as he did so.

"As you mentioned, there are two problems with using the computer – power and internet. The power is a relatively easy problem to solve – one of the earlier spells I learned simply creates lightning, and once I find a natural material that conducts magic, such as tree sap or crushed leaves of a particular tree, this array that I am making will be able to store the electricity from the spell and slowly release it into the plug, charging the computer. It's a stopgap measure, but far easier than creating a power grid here and power lines from here to Whitehorse.

The signal is a far more difficult problem for me. I could enhance the part of the computer that receives the internet signal if I knew which one it was and had access to the right materials, but for all I know the right materials are on the other side of the world. I'll be trying to build a router equivalent over the next few days with a far more industrial power supply, probably a larger structure that I'll mount on the roof."

Nicholas nodded. "So are you going to do anything until then? Any other supplies you need me to look out for?"

Roland shrugged as he set down the piece of stone and plugged one end of the charger into the openings and the other into the computer. A quick cast of Lightning later and one of the symbols on the top of the magical battery began to glow a bright yellow.

"If you could get a few samples of herbs and some samples of cheap metal that would be great. I can transmute copper, iron, or aluminum into gold for some more funding, and anything that could be used as a magic material is worth looking into. There's no rush to do this, of course – so long as everything's ready in the next two weeks and… four days? Perhaps five. It is better to acquire as much data as possible, but the time for that will come eventually."

After a minute of silence, Nicholas slapped his hands on his kneed and stood up. "Well, I'll be leaving you to it, then. I'll be headed back to the city on Wednesday, so I'll look around then. If there's anything else you need, just give me a holler."

Roland stood up, walking him to the door. "Once again, thank you, Nicholas."

"It's my pleasure."

It turned out that turning a large portion of the room into a sea of flames was not something the scientists had been prepared for, though their equipment had certainly been ready. Nothing had burned, and she had only been able to exhale for about four seconds. Once the flames had died out and the scientists had gotten over their surprise, there was quite a bit of discussion among them about how high such an ability should rate.

Apparently, there was a cape named Spitfire who had a very similar ability, and they had given Betta the same rating – Blaster 4. Spitfire was new enough that they hadn't found her on the PHO wiki, but one of the technicians had been nice enough to show them a recording of the other parahuman using her power.

After that, they had gone through some very basic testing for the Brute, Mover, and Changer ratings for Betta's body and generally agreed on a low rating for the three of them, lowering all of the values to a 2 after the spell pupped began to crack under the hydraulic press they were using to test the armor. The technicians had been disappointed that she could not use either her Shaker powers in the limited time they had, but her descriptions of making crops grow more efficiently, increasing transportation speeds within and between lands she owned, and making buildings within more sturdy earned her the provisional rating of Shaker 5.

They had apparently far underestimated the significance of the effects, with one of the workers theorizing that she was speeding up the passage of time at will within any land that she had a claim to, and between them as well in the case of transportation.

The sun was getting low on the horizon as she and Miss Militia entered the elevator leading to the area where the Wards stayed while on the Rig. The two of them entered the room, and before them a majority of the wards were assembled to meet them.

Miss Militia spoke up first. "Aegis, Gallant, Vista, and Clockblocker, it's great to see you all. This is a new cape, codenamed Betta, who plans on joining in the near future. She's only here as part of an introduction and hasn't signed anything yet, so don't go revealing your secret identities or anything."

With that introduction, she stepped into one of the corners of the room, pulling back from the group to allow them to introduce themselves. She shook hands with the four of them, Clockblocker going last with his usual trick of freezing someone while shaking their hand. It worked, as it always had, and the group of Wards let out a collective groan while Vista warped space to get a better angle on slapping the back of his head.

"Way to go, Clock, now we get to sit here and wait until it wears off. Why do you always do this? It was funny the first time, sure, but it's just a drag when it's someone we actually want to talk to."

Backing away from the angry girl as much as he could, Clockblocker attempted to justify his actions. "Hey, if I never try it what happens when someone shows up with a power that counters mine? If I try to freeze them to protect them in the middle of a fight and it doesn't work, it would be my fault for not freez- ow!"

His flimsy rationalization was unable to convince Vista to stop hitting him, he did his best to dodge the incoming blows while one hand was still trapped in Betta's frozen grasp. Their scuffle was brought to an end by the arrival of an unmasked Shadow Stalker, who took less than a second looking at the scene before scoffing. "Another newbie, huh? And they fell for Clockblocker's trick like a fucking idiot. There goes any hope of them being strong."

From her position in the corner, Miss Militia reprimanded her. "Shadow Stalker, refrain from swearing while in costume, especially while on the Rig. Now, put your mask on before she unfreezes so that none of us have to deal with the mountain of paperwork that would ensue."

Shadow Stalker rolled her eyes as she grabbed her mask from where it was clipped to her side and pulled it over her face. "Like some weakling would dare out a Ward."

There was a small amount of confusion concerning Taylor and Betta's shared control over her body through their powers, so I'm posing my response here as well.

His in-game avatar (his soul) is contained within the Lesser Benediction Spell Puppet, which surrounds Taylor's body when manifested as a part of her power. When the avatar is manifested, Betta has control over Taylor's body but Taylor retains control over all parts not covered by the spell puppet. Everyone can see the projection, but her stranger rating is preventing people from paying attention to her unless they are looking for her or she is directly affecting them in some other way. Betta is currently not capable of separating from Taylor and I do not plan for that unless she either second-triggers or Roland arrives and spends a while researching.