Chance (Worm SI/ToF)

By: Anonymoous

Another Tinker of Fiction SI. Hopefully my own spin on it is entertaining.

Status: ongoing

Published: 2023-03-29

Updated: 2023-04-06

Words: 40427

Chapters: 10

Original source: https/forums./threads/1080813

Exported with the assistance of

Chance (Worm SI/ToF)

Introduction

Burden 1.1

Burden 1.2

Burden 1.3

Burden 1.4

Burden 1.5

Burden 1.6

Burden 1.X (Interlude; Lisa)

Pressure 2.1

Pressure 2.2

Pressure 2.3

Burden 1.1

I woke up in a gritty alleyway with no real memory of how I got there. In point of fact, the last thing I could recall was…

"Goddamn deer."

The cervine menace striking me once again. A drive home on a slick road with not enough time to break, a stupid oversized rabbit getting slammed with a truck. Then everything went dark, but this sure as hell wasn't a hospital, so what had happened in between "car crash" and "naked in alley"?

Oh. I was naked. That's why everything was…

I looked down at myself, reconciling several facts. I was pretty sure I'd lost a good chunk of height, a lot of weight, and maybe some other changes. Furthermore, something was wrong with my brain, I had ideas in my head that really weren't relevant to the situation. That was actually normal, thoughts that were incongruous with the situation. My first, extremely stupid thought when I saw the C tattooed onto my chest was that I'd somehow ended up in the Worm setting, for instance.

That was so unlikely it wasn't even funny, but I'd been reading too much lately, so there it was.

I had a tattoo, I was shorter and slimmer, and my whole body was that sort of burning sore that came with exercise. I had no idea where I was, the nearest city certainly wasn't coastal like I was currently smelling. CLEARLY the Deer Mafia had put out another hit on me, but then who dragged my ass to the coast under the influence of drugs that fuzzed - more like wiped the harder I think about it - my memory, and made me shorter and slimmer?

"Ah, shit."

None of this made any sense. I wasn't going to get answers out in the city though, not yet. Wandering out there naked and looking like a dirty Native was a great way to get arrested for public indecency and probably get slapped with intoxication despite not being such. Instead, I stayed hunkered down but rolled into a sitting position with my back to the brickwork, brushing my dark hair out of my eyes and off the itchy parts of my neck.

Then I tried everything in my power to remember what happened after the encounter with the deer.

I had nothing. Not a single moment. One second its stupid fucking head is smashing through my windshield as I close my eyes, the next I'm opening them here. It was a shock, how seamless that transition was. Like going to bed and waking up the next day.

Speaking of shock! I am naked in an alleyway and calmly contemplating how this happened. I am now concerned that this is not a normal reaction. Something in my brain is clearly broken beyond the norm. On the one hand its great that I am not currently having a panic attack, on the other hand this is an issue because I should be having a panic attack and I am currently not. I'm not exactly numb, either, mostly just confused.

I figure I can stay confused a little longer. Long enough for the sun to set so I can slink around without getting immediately arrested. Maybe. No telling what my odds were of getting caught out in any situation.

I curled up a little tighter and let my head loll.

I was tired already, it wasn't too hard to pass out.

I woke up with an urgent need to take a piss, an empty stomach, and a sore body. At least one of those could be taken care of. It wasn't pretty, my face was all crusted over from snot and tears that I hadn't been able to wipe away, and I was left to piss in an alleyway under the night sky. It was cold, but not deathly so, more a pleasant cool with a sea breeze tousling my hair.

Well, nice to know some places had already gotten through winter. That or I'd been out longer than I thought. I wasn't sure which was more likely, given, again, I'd literally shrunk and my body felt smaller and wrong because of it.

With my personal business attended to, I was left to hope I wouldn't get immediately caught as I sought out the local equivalent of a goodwill. To emerge from the alleyway and learn more about the world, I would blindly fumble around until I did a crime. Amazing. Was I being overly paranoid about getting in contact with police after a situation like this?

Nah. Fuck pigs and double-fuck feds.

I took in a deep breath and stepped out of my dark alley. I had never been very good with cities, but I tried to move casually and stay out of sight. Stuck near walls and in the shadows, stumbled every few feet either because I was half-blind or because I was walking barefoot, and was generally probably really slow and obvious. Lucky for me, I was clearly in a "quiet" part of town, the type of place where you stay indoors as much as possible for fear of assholes.

I eventually found a newspaper stand, one of those quarter-dispensers. It was mostly empty, but I could squint at the title of the paper at the back and get a date. Half-blind, I didn't trust that I'd read "2010" in the slightest, but there was no mistaking the name of the paper. Brockton Bugler.

I pressed my face right up against the glass, uncaring about public indecency. I had to be sure I was really, truly reading that right. Brockton. That… could still be coincidence. The black-and-white photo of a man in armor standing in front of a motorcycle with a spear. Cosplay. Right? Just a cosplay thing, some local event.

I looked down once more at the C tattooed onto my chest.

Just a coincidence. Right!?

"Hahaaaaaa fuck."

Put it out of mind, I told myself. Just put it out of mind until clothes were on and privacy was attained. THEN freak out.

So I stumbled along, staying out of sight and out of mind of the city until I found a thrift store. It was pure luck that there was one within a few blocks, and it still left me with a simple problem.

I had no reliable way of getting a door open, and while it was unlikely to have a security system… it wasn't impossible.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to just open any of the doors. They were all properly locked up, nobody was lazy or unaware of security risks here. Even the garage door wasn't going to go anywhere from the outside. If I tried to break in as I was, I'd probably just hurt myself. I didn't have something to wrap my arm in, the windows were out because of that… unless.

No, still not the windows even if I found a loose piece of junk to bust them with. Glass was a lot more of a pain in the ass to replace than a door. I wasn't trying to be a complete dick, I just needed some clothes. What I really needed was a credit card or something else to slip into the door's latch. I wasn't confident the trick would work, but it would at least be something to try. The alternative was an old coat hanger… which a thrift store might actually have in their trash.

Their dumpster was pretty much right behind me and I was a lot more willing to brave it right now than I would have been back home.

In that singular moment, I could almost feel the amount of luck being burned up. The last mercy the universe had for me consumed in an instant as I pushed up the lid of the dumpster. First off, the dumpster was unlocked in the first place, probably as a service to the local community. Secondly, the old and broken coat-hangers I was looking for were pretty much right on top, just a couple, but I didn't need much. I grabbed three, sat down on the stairs in front of the door I was trying to break open, and set to work.

With just my hands, this wasn't going to be pretty, and I had to hope I wouldn't cut myself on the broken ends of the wires. I carefully unwound the broken wires and removed the cardboard tubes on them. From there, I twisted everything I had into one long piece, and then bent a hook into the whole thing after I tested that the "knots" I'd made in the wire would still go under the door. Unfortunately the wire wasn't thin enough to just go into the sides so I couldn't trip the latch that way. I had to bend everything under and then start slapping the stupid fucking thing around.

Deviant made this look so fucking easy. Like anything, it actually took practice, but I was lucky to even think of this in the middle of my situation. So I prayed nobody would notice as a naked man jiggled a wire under a door, using another bend in the thing to work as a "handle" so I could get it into position. After what felt like forever, I finally caught, and then yanked back and down.

The door popped open, and I let out a sigh of relief as all my strings were cut. It was a struggle not to just flop backwards, but I didn't have anything to protect me from the ground. Instead, I pulled the door open and all but threw myself inside.

The inside was even darker than the city streets, of course. I was already half-blind anyways, fuzzy shapes being about my limit. I knew for a fact that without my glasses I wouldn't even be able to read a laptop in front of me unless my face got right up next to it. I'd had to strain to read the title for the newspaper. So I fumbled around for a light switch, deciding that someone showing up late at night to do something would turn the lights on rather than keep them off. Probably conspicuous, but not that bad.

With the lights on, things were about as could be expected for a thrift store or pawn shop. Racks of clothes, a glass counter that had some miscellaneous items on it, so on and so forth. Mostly it had clothes, but there were shelves of other things that might be useful to me. Really, though, I only had two priorities.

Clothes, and a bathroom.

My body was smaller than it used to be, I still wasn't sure if I'd been shrunk or if I'd been de-aged, but I ended up being two sizes down on shirts, so still an XL, and I'd lost three inches on pants in length, and more on width.

Yay, I was merely overweight now, and my gym membership back home would see no change in use. The wonders of whatever had happened to me never ceased. And now I was dressed in a nice big hoodie, a longsleeve blue t-shirt, and some basic cargo pants. Steel-toe workers boots made my steps heavy as I marched off to my next goal.

Privacy. A bathroom I could lock myself into and just… consider what I'd seen.

Hidden in the bathroom in the back office portion of the store, I looked at the C marked around my nipple, and sat down on the toilet. There was one way to be certain. If I could actually use some sort of superpower, it would confirm everything. I just had to hope the power I had wasn't too loud. Actually I had to hope I had no power at all. That would be ideal. Having no power would do a lot to distance myself from the idea that I'd actually landed in Brockton Bay of Worm infamy.

I tried to feel out what I could do, I tried to feel out any sort of power.

To my horror, and maybe just a little glee, I found something. Like there was a valve of Ideas in my mind and I'd turned the tap.

I had power. More than power, I had a Tinker power. The art of creation.

Still more, it was a Tinker power with a Specialty that shifted. I could feel the timer ticking down in my head before a new "pipe" would be slotted in. Like rotating the chamber of a revolver. This metaphor was getting out of hand, but it told me I had two weeks before everything changed. Right now, it was centered around the concepts of a Digital World, the Monsters that would inhabit it, and how things would go back and forth between its Servers and physical reality. It didn't take me too long, once I found the smaller-scale devices, to put together what it was.

Not just a Tinker. A Tinker of Fiction. Digimon waiting for me to create wonders.

That was about the point I started laughing and sobbing like a lunatic. About the point where reality slammed through my skull like a fifty-cal and shattered my already-fragile psyche. The power was right there, it was real. That meant the C meant something. That meant the Brockton Bugler meant something. That meant, assuming I wasn't fucking hallucinating as I experienced death-by-cervine, I was actually stuck on Earth Bet.

That I had my memories and the power I did while not being locked in a room at Cauldron's base was… I didn't even know what to think. Given the only "mutation" was that I'd been… what, de-aged? I looked about like what I did when I was five years younger, give or take. So… was the C just a convenient excuse for how I'd been dropped here? Did Cauldron actually know I existed? Would they know if I started thinking too hard? Probably not, but… best to only refer to them as C in my head so I didn't slip up?

Wait, why was I thinking about that instead of literally anything more important?

"God. Damnit." I hissed to myself. "Focus. Think. The tattoo's got to go."

The Protectorate was literally run from the top down by Cauldron - by C. Being in Brockton would give me no protection against them even with their "experiment" going on. Just popping up in Brockton would set off alarm bells, because there was no way they wouldn't check me against their records of C-53s that got offloaded. If I was on there, then they'd fumbled so many steps I couldn't imagine not being reclaimed immediately somehow. If I wasn't on there… same thing, though maybe they'd think I was… didn't they have a scapegoat?

The same issue came up if I ran to the villains. No chance could I go near Faultline's crew, tattoo or no. They got too close to Fedora-bitch. I'd struggle with lying, badly. Fuck being a nazi, I wasn't asian, just Native, so the ABB was out. I wasn't going to join the fucking Merchants, for sure. Uber and Leet… I'd be competition for Leet. They'd fucking hate me. Not to mention they were absolute trash-tier and their resources… probably weren't great.

I had a little under fourteen days to work with Digimon. Unless I wanted to wait two weeks to do anything, I would need computer resources and people that would help me get them without setting off every Tinker alarm in the city. I also had to consider which group was in a position where I could minimize the Bullshit that came swinging my way.

Which left the only major faction in Brockton.

Coil.

Either join the Undersiders or join him directly. One would put me extremely close to Tattletale, which would put me way too close to danger. The other would mean working directly for one of the most despicable pricks in the world.

I had clothes now, I could always rob enough cash to hitchhike my way to Ohio, or go south and join… what, the Elite?

But again, minimizing the issues that would come swinging at me. The Devil I knew was going to be a lot easier to manage than the ones I didn't know. Joining the Elite would put me on a collision course with the unknown and I didn't trust myself enough to do anything about that. I'd probably end up… locked in a box somewhere, tinkering away and slowly going insane.

I couldn't do that. That couldn't be me. Toybox wasn't much better, I'd either end up in their pocket-space and eventually fucked because of the Nine, or… well much the same but I avoid the Nine and then all the people I'd built relationships with would be dead, because I just had to assume that they wouldn't listen if I told them the Nine could find them.

I couldn't be alone. I could not handle being Alone in a new world. Coil… being near Coil would give me the chance to throw out feelers with people - characters - I knew. I could stay at arms-reach with Tattletale and the Undersiders and help them bring Coil down from the inside. If I did it fast enough, that might stop the Travelers from coming up, which would, in theory, also prevent Leviathan from visiting. I could crash the canon-train while staying with familiar threats and make familiar friends.

I could, conceivably, prevent him from committing the biggest atrocity he pulled "on-screen" and prevent Dinah's kidnapping. All it would take is getting close to and backstabbing the guy that got two tries at everything. A chance to dodge just- everything horrible I knew was coming save for Gold Morning itself.

But again, the little C on my chest, and the conflict that made with me knowing so much. Lying to Thinkers was… trouble. I could maybe, possibly get away with just avoiding nip-slips, but I'd probably end up on a torture table at some point if I went near Coil. That would make the mark obvious and invite questions I couldn't answer.

This made sense to me. I just… I just had to get rid of the stupid fucking tattoo, join Coil for his resources and backstab him to prevent a fucking Endbringer from dropping on the city, and I'd be okay. It would work. I just had to prevent the C question from being asked.

Time to carve off a few more ounces, with the sharpest knife I could find.

Back out in the thrift store, I got behind the counter, finding that the disc-lock that held the glass display from being opened was easy enough to thumb-twist. Again, a little bit of luck. Enough to help me grab a kitchen knife.

Back in the bathroom. Cold flushing through my veins and something twisting up inside my guts as I looked down, again, at the brand that just needed to go the fuck away right now.

I held the knife there, took in a deep breath, and tried to slice down.

As soon as I felt the tug of it I yanked the knife away and let it skitter into the sink, slamming into the wall behind me with a hiss of clenched teeth.

Okay, so my situation might have made me more willing to walk around a city naked and go dumpster diving. It had done nothing to make me willing to cut myself. Oh slamming my head against hard objects was an option all the live-long day, but actually cutting was apparently off the goddamn table still.

Great. I was a fucking pussy. Okay. How else could I get rid of this damn thing? Cutting it off was impossible, burning it was equally off the table. Anything that wasn't a permanent removal would fail in the face of Coil or the Protectorate. If I couldn't get this damn mark off my body I was going to be fucked against the snake and the fedora. There was no lie that would save me from the mismatching information I presented. If I claimed the C was just a tattoo, they would know I was lying. If I claimed I had no memories, they'd know I was lying. The same went for the Protectorate, but Cauldron would hear and probably care about that faster.

I couldn't just keep it covered. Coil would strap me to the table and probe me for info in some timeline or other… and the Protectorate would get me with basic medical checkups.

Shit. He'd learn a whole lot more if I ever gave him the excuse to do that. I wouldn't trust him with that info, but I don't know how I'd keep it from him. The same was true for the Protectorate in a lesser way. Armsmaster's fucking lie detector… and just the Think Tank that might catch me out.

I sank to my ass in that bathroom, clutching my head.

There really was nowhere to go, huh. I couldn't lie to literally save my life. Not well enough, anyways. It was either face this pain now and cut the tattoo off, or ruin everything.

I didn't know if I could do it, but I had to try. Damn whatever or whoever had put that fucking thing on me, for making everything so much more complicated.

I left the knife where it was and went looking for something else. What were the odds there was a good medkit in this building somewhere?

I wasn't looking for something random, I had a specific goal in mind. Lidocane. If I could get some of that in, I'd be much more willing- fuck, no. Damnit. That wouldn't work either, mostly on the basis that I didn't know WHERE to inject it for what I was doing, and that would probably be an easy one to screw up. I didn't have the know-how to apply it, even though I knew what it was and what it did.

"Know just enough to get myself into trouble." I chuckled morosely to myself, standing back in the bathroom several minutes later. I had found a medkit anyways, because doing this without having disinfectants and gauze on hand was fucking retarded. I just wouldn't have painkillers outside of the standard wombo-combo of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.

I put a dowel rod I'd snagged between my teeth - oh hey, my jaw wasn't fucked anymore, no underbite - and bit down on it. A few shaking breaths were all I gave myself before I pinched my nipple in one hand and cut down on myself like a fucking pork loin.

It was over in a flash, a cold tug followed by burning pain as my hand came free and splattered a slice of my chest into the sink. Everything except the burning spot on my chest flushed cold with adrenaline, and my breathing sharpened as much as it quickened. I tore my eyes open again, unsure when they'd closed, and got to handling the aftermath before the high of the moment wore off and the pain really set in.

Wash everything in cool water, dispose of the chunk of flesh in a trash can and bury it under the old TP rolls that were in there. Dry everything off with paper towels, then apply disinfectant goo to the gauze pad before slapping it on my chest and getting to taping it down.

So glad I knew some basics for first aid. So glad I could actually apply that knowledge after cutting my nipple off.

The good news was that this confirmed that the mark wasn't more than skin-deep. When I'd washed it off I hadn't seen anything indicating that the tattoo was still there or would grow back. I could be wrong, of course, but at least now I'd have time.

Oh fuck that was going to be sore for a while. I'm glad I didn't break any of my teeth with how hard I bit down on the fucking rod. In fact I think I'm going to struggle to get my mouth open again. Fortunately a quick test shows I'm wrong about that, and the dowel comes free, tossed in the trash with the rest. After some searching, I find the new bags, take the one that has all my evidence in it, and bring it with me as I leave. It goes in the dumpster to never be found, along with the kitchen knife.

Meanwhile, a backpack slung over one shoulder now holds a change of clothes, the rest of that medkit so I can manage my own injury, and some other odds-and-ends. There hadn't been anything I needed to enact my current plans, so it was just some basic shit. My own soaps and such. Hopefully nobody would even notice I'd been there.

My next problem was food, but as long as I could get some water that could wait. Fortunately, I now lived in a pre-covid world. Water fountains were still real and not just traps for idiots to waste time on. Walk a mile or so, reach a park with a public restroom, drink to fill the void in my soul with pure, clean water that only tasted a little iron-y.

With that done… not much else to do but wait until the nearest public library opened. Or rather until the Boardwalk opened as a whole. Once that happened I could go snag a tourist brochure and then use that map to find a library.

In the meantime, I holed up in the bathroom and went over the vague plan being built in my mind. The things I would need, how to get Coil to accept my services, and so on. With the knowledge of the Digital World inside my mind and the understanding of how to literally convert digital data into physical mass… I wasn't sure if just shy of two weeks would be enough time, but I was going to try.

As the sun rose, I navigated half-blind to the nearest library, threw myself onto PHO with a profile I intended to abandon, and hoped that Coil's "pet fox" would lead to what I wanted.

Somewhere around a half-hour later, the strangest thing was that this stupid half-cocked plan had actually worked and gotten me black-bagged into a mystery van. I was on my way to meet the snake, or at least his body-double.

A/N: I have minimal idea of what I'm doing and the "list" of fictions that the MC will have access to is fluctuating, right now there's only ten settings. I'll be rolling for them, and if I manage to settle on enough other options I'll expand it to a D20 instead. No more than that though, having access to the tech of twenty different worlds is already insane. I will not spoil what the list is.

My other story (Arcing Over Backwards) will continue on its weekly update schedule without interference from this one.

Inspired by "Plan? What Plan!?" by Fabled Webs.

EDIT: The above underwent a sweeping change. The old version is listed in Apocrpyha for those few that actually care about such things.

Last edited: Mar 28, 2023

Burden 1.2

He wasn't dumb enough to meet someone in-person, of course. I was brought into an empty room that looked a lot like a police interrogation chamber, with a laptop in front of me held by a mercenary. As my hood came off and I was allowed to see everything, I studied the person's "face" on the other side of that screen. Black bodysuit with a snake pattern that ended at the forehead. He got to see my face, but there was nothing to let me see his even if I'd wanted to.

For a moment, we stared at each other in silence. I'd never been the greatest at talking in-person, especially without time to think. This time, I had a rough idea of what I wanted to negotiate for. But I'd never actually spoken to a supervillain in my life. I had no idea how this was going to go. The cold adrenaline flushing through my body was probably making me break out in sweat, but if it was I couldn't really notice it or do anything about it. The room itself was uncomfortably cool even with my hoodie on.

I brought my lips inwards and chewed on them without really thinking about it, wondering who was supposed to start this conversation. Since he seemed to be waiting patiently, the burden was on me. Lovely.

"Coil." I began, and then immediately got interrupted by him before I could get another word out.

"Yes, that is indeed what I call myself." He said, his voice smooth and deep, I swore he was trying not to laugh at me, something about the way he spoke. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this arrangement? It is not every day that someone puts up an anonymous post on a public computer seeking a meeting. Those that matter have better means of contacting me, and those that don't tend to wish to avoid me. What exactly are you, if not one of those two groups?"

Might as well have been setting me up for my response. In fact I think he was.

"Someone who will matter soon." I swallowed, trying not to do anything more with my hands or my face. "I'll be frank, I've had a shitty time of things recently. Shitty enough that I got powers out of them. Tinker powers. I know you know what that means for a guy wearing thrift store rags."

"So you come to bargain with me, then. Tell me, do you know what it is you can do?"

Here came the part where I might get locked up in a little bedroom forever. Here came the part where I had to trust a man styling himself after a snake to respect a guy like me. Here came the part where honesty was still, somehow, the best policy. To a degree.

Or maybe I was just throwing myself into this because it was too late to regret the choice. I didn't know.

"I can do everything." I said softly. "Specifically, I can do a different subset of Everything every two weeks. Right now, I have a little over or under thirteen days to work with technology that converts matter into digital data and back again, with an emphasis on the back again. This technology also very specifically covers the field of Artificial Intelligences that grow more akin to animals or humans than… well, what they could be. Put shortly, I create Digital Beasts and the environments to hold them, and the tech that can make them very much physical."

My fingers itched in a way I hadn't noticed until now. Having a computer in front of me made me feel like I needed to crack my knuckles, except in my entire hand. It was a desire almost on the same level as the hunger in my gut. Ignorable, but very much present now that I'd made the mistake of focusing on it. I wanted to get to work. I wanted to Create.

I wanted Coil to let me work without shackling me completely.

God this was the dumbest plan I could have come up with, huh?

Too late now. I moved forwards in a rush of words, stumbling and slurring for a moment. Then I took a deep breath, and tried again.

"Ahem. I have a Plan. One that I hope I can accomplish before the rotation happens. The tech will allow Data to be manifested from, quite literally, thin air. Having denser air with lots of particulates helps, but- off track. The point is that the Digital Beasts are not the only thing I could create. The environments they live in could be transported out as well, to create… food. Food brought from a digital world to ours, grown from "garbage data" the same way plants grow from compost. Then they can be harvested and extracted, allowing for self-sufficient food growth on the scale of a decent hydroponics farm but in a room that could be about as small as a janitor's closet. That is what I offer you. In exchange, to kickstart our little relationship, I need the equipment to produce that digital farm in the first place, a place to meet my basic human needs, and, most importantly… I need freedom, Coil."

Deep breath. That had been a lot to get out. Fortunately the snake was listening and probably had gotten more invested as I went on. I knew he wanted his little secret compound to be as quiet as possible. This was a major boost to that, since he wouldn't need to import food or build hydroponics underground.

"I'm willing to join your organization, but I'm not willing to be shackled. I'd blow my own brains out if I was locked up somewhere. If we want to work with each other, I think it would be best done… at arms length of sorts. Help me set up an apartment and paperwork for a legitimate identity here, and I'll be the man who gave a snake its legs."

That joke probably made minimal sense to these people, but the image of Coil shoved in a plastic tube with orange "cybernetic limbs" made it hard not to so much as snort. It did a lot to defuse the tension in my mind.

Of course, Coil could just set guards on me to make sure I didn't commit sudoku and then force me to work, but… Tinker. No telling if what I was making would end up being a bomb, especially if I was being honest about the rotating specialty. I was, but he probably wouldn't be able to verify that on his own in the first two weeks.

Was it enough to actually keep me safe from this guy? Hell no, but it would at least get me a start. It would put me in a similar position to Tattletale, where I had a leash of sorts, but I could play in the snake's backyard. Not shackled directly to a desk.

The room was silent save for the quiet breaths of the three mercs around me and the gentle hum of an A/C unit.

"What are the chances of these "Digital Beasts" becoming a Situation such as, say, an army of automatons that consume my city?"

"Effectively zero, both because I have an interest in not doing that to begin with and because the format this technology takes just doesn't allow it. They would interact with digital environments more like… a person in a room, or a castle in the case of a very large network. They can navigate it incredibly quickly, and run around to various tasks faster than we can blink, but they can only exist in one position at a time, really. That's part of why it would be possible in the first place to give them physical bodies that aren't just drones at their command."

I coughed. Wow, it really was easy for Tinkers to ramble. But I was pretty sure I had sufficiently answered the question, so I let my face burn away all it damn wanted.

"Any apartment I give you cannot become a place you operate from, is this understood? Your workshop will be a separate building entirely, you will not be privy to its exact location."

That… that was acceptable. That meant that this whole thing was going to work, at least for now.

"Understood. I'm glad we can work together, Coil."

"I could say much the same, save that I do not yet know your name."

I thought about that for a moment. Tempted to use one of my old screen names, but it was too close to Eidolon in pronunciation (which was funny in its own right given what my own power was) and just didn't feel right. My real name? Hell no. Something else that started with E, then, and I could come up with a proper Cape name later.

"Edward. Call me Edward. Once I have a mask I'll pick up a different name, but Edward works for now."

"Very well, pleased to be working with you, Edward. I will allow one of my assistants to take over the brass tacks of the matter from here."

And that's how I spent the next two hours working out exactly how tight my shackles to Coil were. By not having unrestricted access to my Lab (at least the one Coil would set up for me), I was pretty tightly tied to him. Any moves to build my own would be tracked down, no doubt, and get him very displeased with me. I was absolutely under his thumb, no two ways around it. By calling him out and allowing myself to get black-bagged, I'd basically put myself under his thumb.

Right where I wanted to be, or so I told myself.

I had a work schedule, twelve-hour shifts in the lab. I'd get paid for it, on top of the apartment and utilities being covered. Fifteen hundred every two weeks, no matter what I produced, "washed" through a shell company Coil owned. I'd look like a legitimate employee, eighteen years of age. The first paycheck was being "cut" down to only 750 in exchange for setting up my identity. That was our baseline agreement, contingent on producing what I was currently calling the Server Farm. If and when I produced that miracle of tech, things would get negotiable again.

Once my two weeks with Digimon were up, I'd get to talk to him directly again and go over what my new Focus was. Then we'd decide what major project he wanted out of that Focus, establish what I got out of the deal, and so it would go.

All in all, not a bad deal for someone's first day in a new world. The problems of working directly for Coil notwithstanding.

I was dropped off at my new apartment with a key, told paperwork for my new identity ("Edward Alphonse" because I couldn't help myself) would be set up in the next week, and was given instructions to prepare myself to get to work tomorrow, presenting myself for the "company car" early in the morning. I had seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash in my pocket, and not a lot else to my name.

But it was enough. After the car fucked off, I used a scratchpad I'd scavenged from the thrift store to write down the address of the apartment, tucked that away, and set off.

I was going to celebrate by getting a slab of prime rib and a little cake, along with a laptop to fuck around with. Unfortunately I could not yet develop an alcoholic habit, because I had no ID. Even once I did have an ID- actually he'd probably give me one that was 20-something and a "real" one that was 18.

Probably for the best that I wasn't able to start drinking right away. I had a lot of "reasons" to try and numb myself with alcohol. None were good enough to be worth that vice. I settled for a huge slab of prime rib, brussel sprouts, tiny red potatoes, and mushrooms. Plus a basic box cake mix and the stuff to bake it properly. A few other odds-and-ends to fuel my snacking habit.

The apartment itself had already been furnished and loaded up with a set of the basics for living. TP, dishes, some basics in the fridge which were added to by my brief shopping spree, so on and so forth. Nothing top of the line, nothing that was "thrift store" quality either, though. I'd have to buy my own clothes and such, but Coil clearly didn't think an apartment was too high a cost for getting a personal Tinker of my caliber working for him.

Munching on goldfish crackers (and thank god those existed here) and a sandwich, I used the time I had today to brush up on the world. Find the edges of my knowledge and start filling them in. I didn't get very far, though. If you weren't yourself a Cape and connected, it was a struggle to actually get info. The PHO wiki was next-to-useless. The forums, for all that they tracked things, were full of trash that needed sifting through to get useful information from. If I hadn't known that monitoring places like this was practically Tattletale's day job (and that she was working with Coil right now), I'd have been fucked on contacting the snake through it.

Oh, I'd found out what year it was too, that was fairly important.

October of 2010. About six months before the shit officially hit the fan. Still in the earlier days of the Undersiders, and plenty of time to get ahead of the Traveler problem. Ideally I'd suggest Coil pick them up even before they let… time guy get sent to the Yangban. Mostly because that guy was a time BOMB and if it could be at all managed I had to do it.

Reason number whatever for why I'd picked Coil to throw in with: the idea that Thinkers interfered with each other. Being around him and working on his orders was better protection against Z than anything else I could come up with in the moment.

God I hoped that wasn't just a rationalization for joining the guy who gets his jollies off by killing people and torturing literal children.

With that cheery thought in mind, I got on with my day, using the scratchpad to organize my thoughts until it was a good time to make dinner, then working on that. I didn't want to put anything on a laptop connected to the internet, even with the router and such having been set up by Coil. Just felt like a stupid idea when my current Focus was with digital lifeforms. I kept my notes on pen-and-paper, though I wasn't quite at the point of developing my own code language yet.

I didn't just want to make the Server Farm. In fact I wanted to get the Server Farm (at least the Farm itself, if not the systems that would project its produce into the physical world) done in… three days or less. I wasn't sure if that was going to be possible, but it was a goal. I wanted the entire system done in a week or less, so I had some "free" time to work on something else.

I HAD to make a Digimon partner. I HAD to avoid being a Alone.

The initial thought was, of course, Renamon. It took a lot of reasoning and self-reflection to throw that idea in the trash and not just go for it. A LOT of reasoning myself out of it. I wanted to have a Renamon as a partner, badly.

If I ever gave Tattletale a Digivice, SHE could be trusted with a Renamon.

I could not.

I instead went over the options in my head and picked a Lineage that would actually enjoy helping with the Server Farm. Someone who could be content in such a place.

I wanted a Palmon as my partner. The plant digimon with a paralytic attack, and it can digivolve into a big damn cactus with boxing gloves. Perfect for managing the Server Farm until I got it into a state resembling automation or set it up so one of Coil's mercs could manage it.

In the field, Poison Ivy and other techniques were perfect for non-lethal assaults. Palmon in "base" form could handle pretty much anything beyond Brutes, and if I could somehow pull off a Champion Digivolution then Togemon would be able to box with anything short of an A-Class. My chances of Ultimate… slim to none. Not for a long time. Champion digimon were basically "adult", so it wouldn't be too hard to handle one, but Ultimate was a literal class above and beyond. Mega… basically out of the question, given how much data is required.

Damn if it wouldn't be cool to have a Mega-tier digimon duke it out with an Endbringer.

On that note… while I had the power, my "stretch goal" as it was was to develop three different Digimon and three Digivices. I was serious about getting a Renamon to Tattletale.

I was more serious about giving Dinah something to help her. After I had my own Palmon (or rather a Yuramon to start), I'd prepare a very specific Digi-egg.

I wasn't sure if Dinah was the type of girl who'd wanted to be a princess, but I was going to protect her with a Dragon. Dodomon was going to be the egg that was stored in stasis for her. It might not end up going along the path to becoming Alphamon, and Mega was, again, pretty much out of the question, but still. It was the thought that mattered.

I knew my chances of stopping Coil before Dinah was captured were slim to none, unless something really lucky happened. I was going to prepare, instead, to make her imprisonment as comfortable as possible. It didn't help that I'd probably need her numbers for seeing if my methods of handling the Echidna inside of Noelle would work. Whatever those methods ended up being.

Shit, right here with the Digimon tech… I might be able to pull Noelle into a Digital World - yes, A Digital World, not THE, because Earth Bet wasn't founded on Digimon tech so isolated servers were basically their own damn universes as far as I understood - and then set about solving the problem by developing… what, would that be an X-Antibody? No. The X Program itself, if handled correctly, could purify Noelle by deleting all the shit stuck to her. Maybe. I had no idea how a Shard would handle that, though if anything counted as a goddamn Virus, Echidna did. How to do it without destroying her powers entirely was another matter, but the Travelers would probably just love to have Noelle back at all.

That was all a long way off. Six months, actually. And I had no idea if I'd be able to pull it off, and I was absolutely, 100% not going to be able to develop the fucking X Program in this window I had. I needed to focus on building a foundation.

So I made a parts list for exactly what I'd need to build a custom Server to house the Farm, along with some other things to build Digivices with.

That night, I ate prime rib paid for by a monster of a man, and it tasted good. The bed was simple but nice, the apartment humble but perfect for a single guy to live out of, and the shower right on that beautiful edge of scalding where it felt like you could scour your sins away along with the dirt.

Even with all that, I struggled to sleep, knowing what I'd gotten myself into.

Groggy, operating on coffee loaded up with too much sugar for sane people and a splash of heavy cream, I shuffled down to the street dressed in pretty much the same clothes I wore yesterday. I had the backpack, but not the laptop, just the notepad with the parts list. My bandage was fresh, and I was fairly ready to work.

The basic gray sedan pulled up, a normal man sitting in the driver's seat. I piled in, and he pulled out as I was getting my seatbelt on. Wordlessly, he offered me what amounted to a pillowcase, and I understood the need to pull it over my head. That meant I couldn't watch where we were going, leaving me, once again, Alone with my thoughts.

God I hated it already. That was fine, I wouldn't be Alone for too much longer. Just… a week or two, tops. Then I'd be able to raise up my own Digimon. It still wasn't a proper friend given my role as "creator" and thus "parent", but it was better than nothing. Tattletale and Dinah would probably have different relationships with their Partners.

Fortunately, the ride couldn't have been longer than twenty minutes, and I was allowed to take off the hood once it stopped. I was a nondescript office building, stripped down to one layer above Concrete. The floor was tiled with linoleum, there was an elevator at the back, the interior walls had been pretty much completely removed except for the area around a bathroom and the support pillars left bare. Hookups for utilities lined the exterior walls, and backup generators were set up near the elevators and stairwell.

A single sheet-metal desk and office chair sat near the bathroom, and I commandeered it, pulling out my materials list. The rules were simple: Coil's mercs would procure anything I needed within reason. If it was something outside of reason, they would kick it up their chain of command and I'd need to explain myself. To head that off, I was organizing material needs by project. The Server Farm was mostly going to require standard computer equipment for an office's server room, and I wanted some phones, a 3D printer (they DID exist but only in their most basic and shitty of form right now), and some other radio-shack-tier odds and ends. All of those were what I'd need to build a proper Digivice.

Yeah, a Digivice out of some phones and Radio Shack (well the local equivalent) hobbyist parts. Shit, I was even going above and beyond the specs since I wanted these things to be tools for "hacking" (as much as Digimon perform such) and serve as actual communication devices. The hardest part was going to be cramming all the features I wanted (including a pull-out phone keyboard) into a Digivice that was based on the Frontiers model.

Because the Frontiers model was the coolest. And the biggest/most tactile. That said, it was BASED ON the D-Scanner, not actually sharing the same functions. Even if Tattletale somehow got into the Digital World… even if she had a Renamon… no. No fusion. Fusion bad. Fusion with someone that has a Shard is ASKING for trouble. That said, the Scanner was a great spot to put in things like a USB port.

Wait, when had I handed the list off and started drafting blueprints and circuit boards?

"Ah. Shit." I chuckled to myself. Fortunately the first bit of the list was already coming along. A desktop that I could load the hell up with CAD programs. This one would be allowed to connect to the internet, though it wouldn't ever (barring future upgrades to my comp-tech in general) be used to house full digital projects. Design only, no Digital World fuckery.

That would come soon.

It took me all of ten minutes to get everything hooked up, then several hours to hunt around for the programs I wanted and needed. Then, and only then, could I truly get to work. By that time pretty much everything I'd asked for was present and accounted for, and the two mercs watching over me set about setting up things like the "break room" to pass their time.

I, meanwhile, hit The Zone. Flow State. I didn't "think", I just Did. Planning out the hardware side of things in advance so I knew what to do. Building myself up for success by having the full blueprints of what I was calling the "Digi-Manifester", a large-scale tool that would basically be the Output for the Server Farm. Setting up the Server Farm's physical housing, connecting the racks and racks of Solid-State Storage together, hooking in a monitor and the other mandatory peripherals. Standing on a pad in front of the terabyte-grade (and boy wasn't that a fucking joy to have in 2010) Server, I began the actual hard part. Making a Digital World required programming tools that didn't exist because Earth Bet (and my home, and earth Alph) used completely different languages. It wasn't insurmountable, far from it, actually, Java and C apps talked to each other just fine, Windows and Linux computers could work together, and so on. It was still Difficult, especially since I had to code all my tools from the ground up.

With all the damn time wasted by getting everything ready (because I hadn't gotten my full list of needs to Coil in advance last night, STUPID of me) I wasn't going to be able to start on the Server Farm's code itself today. Still, six and a half hours of work netted me a full IDE for DigiCode. The actual weird-symbol nonsense DigiCode. I didn't care what the fuck humans used in that universe, because all of it was eventually boiled down to this, and THEN to actual Binary. Unicode… wasn't exactly prepared for what I'd just done to it. I think I violated it's TOS.

But I'd done it, and now had a coding language only I could understand. I also had tools to help that code actually talk to anything else. That had been what took the most time, setting things up so that programs made using DigiCode could talk to stuff using CX (Earth Bet's C) and JavaScript and whatever else I'd eventually need. Universal Digital Translator. Side benefit: Digimon operating with that as part of their Cores would probably be able to understand any human language, given time and exposure. By default, though, they'd only know English, because I only knew English.

When I stepped back from the server as an alarm clock on the desk signaled the end of my "shift", I was torn between amazement that I'd managed a full set of devtools in a single fucking day, and agony that I hadn't been able to complete the entire project in that timeframe. I couldn't. I knew for a fact that what I'd just pulled off was some form of minor miracle in and of itself, but I wanted this whole thing done so I could focus on the more complicated and hardware-based side of things. Like the Digi-Manifester and my own DigiVice.

A start. That's all I got for now. The tools to make the things I actually needed.

I went home, not speaking to the merc and wearing the damn pillowcase over my head. Dropped off in front of the apartment again, which felt too quiet to actually be populated. Tomorrow, before anything else, I'd get a photo taken in order to set up IDs and the like. Tonight (My "tinker shift" was 6-6), I spent the last of my cash on groceries and another change of clothes at the local mall. Following that, I crashed on my simple black couch with a plate of leftovers, and considered what I'd gotten myself into again.

That line of thought led me to curling up in the shower as my heart tried to slam out of my chest and my arms buzzed with pressure, clutching my head and breathing too damn fast as hot water tried and failed to boil off my mistakes.

Coil could fucking kill me whenever he wanted. He had mercs watching my every goddamn move. He had the option of torturing me in one timeline and learning everything I knew while I was completely fucking unaware in the other. It might have even happened TODAY. Just black-bagged into a completely different base, drugged up, and slapped around until I spilled all. I would never know if or when Coil would learn the truth of my existence, and now I was irrevocably tied to him unless I somehow built a fucking time machine.

What the FUCK had I been thinking!?

Who wakes up in Brockton Bay with powers and says "I'm going to join COIL directly. Not even the Undersiders, just fucking straight up join forces with the snake."

Who does that!? What the fuck had been done to my skull-sponge where I thought JOIN COIL was the move to make!? Fuck, the boonies plan was better! Letting myself get capped by the Protectorate was better!

Blood turned some of the water pink in bright trails, a reminder of something else I'd done. Something that would have FUCKING MITIGATED THE ISSUES OF-

My head thunked against the floor of the shower. It did not do so gently, nor did it stop at one blow. Only when I was properly seeing stars as punishment for my idiocy did I relax and roll onto my back, hot water forcing me to close my eyes.

"Fuck." I gasped out, chest still heaving and head sore. "God. Fucking. Damnit. Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid!… One shot at life in Worm and you fucking blow it like this!? Moron. Idiot. Fucking trash for brains… god… I'm sorry, everyone… I fucked it all up…"

What could I even do now? Would I even know when the jig was up and Coil became aware of The Plot? Could I prevent that for six fucking months?

I sure as hell couldn't run away to the protectorate NOW, that would just compound the idiocy after the deal I'd worked out. I still didn't even have my IDs that made me anything other than Persona Non Grata in this world.

After I cut my fucking nipple off last night I should have done literally anything other than "join coil", but I'd made my bed and now I had to lie in it.

So how do I lie down? How… how was I supposed to turn this monumental idiocy around?

I didn't know. I actually had no ideas other than "roll with it and keep making shit". Not a single damn clue. Edward, thy title is Moron. On the same scale as Portal's Wheatly, if not vastly worse. Same tier of idiot as the AI literally built from the ground up to have stupid ideas.

I resisted the urge to slam my head against hard surfaces. It wouldn't actually dislodge the stupid from my brain. Not even inter-dimensional travel and a bio-computer the size of a continent could do that, apparently, so I was stuck as I was. An idiot in a gigantic mess with no clear path out.

I slowly exited from the shower, popped painkillers with a mug of hot chocolate instead of coffee, and retired to my barren bedroom.

Laying in the bed I'd made for myself, I hugged a pillow tight to my chest and tried to focus on the reasons I'd gone along with this plan to begin with. To help others. To mitigate the harm the snake would do.

How would I manage that. How would I either save Dinah or mitigate her suffering? How would I save Noelle from her fate? What could I do, right now, to start working towards that?

The bedside lamp flicked on, and I fumbled to get my notepad.

Then, noting at the top of the fucking list of objectives that I still needed an eye exam and glasses, I started writing notes in Digicode.

A/N: Whatever I have that serves as a Muse, it's going hog wild today. I didn't expect to have enough to post another chapter for a week, but here I am with a two-for-one special. Don't thank me, thank the strange creature that pilots my meat-mecha.

Burden 1.3

I'd never been a morning person. My preferred wake-up time was to the tune of noon, something that had me going home from work at midnight before the over-sized rabbit had decided to send me on a one-way trip to Brockton. It was mitigated by coffee in a nice thermos I'd picked up last night, allowing me to carry it with me on my magical adventure to my workshop. Magical because I had no idea how point A and point B connected, courtesy of the hood over my face.

In this case, we were actually going to Point C. I'd forgotten about that for a moment, but when the hood came off to reveal something other than the workshop I remembered after only a brief flicker of panic. Just a brief one. Nobody noticed anything. I absolutely did not whirl around and go wide-eyed and start breathing like Panacea huffing her sister's gym shorts.

The process of getting my photo taken was simple, and despite my "indulgence" last night I hadn't formed a serious goose-egg on my skull, yet. It was sore, but the painkillers had done some of the work on preventing serious swelling. Once it was all wrapped up, I was told it would take another week at the most to get all the rest of my identity set up. They'd also had me fill out some things they'd use to build those false papers. All told, the process took up maybe twenty minutes. The driving another forty. Must have been taking weird routes just to throw me off if I was trying that sort of thing. I wasn't, I didn't particularly care about locations yet, so the ride was just longer than it needed to be for Coil's paranoia.

Before I started work, I did something I should have done yesterday, which only further delayed things. I set up the "design-only" computer with a solid speaker system (ordered in) and put lyric-less post-rock on blast to fill the air. Enough to drown out the near-silence of the workshop. I hadn't noticed it yesterday because I was pretty sure I'd still been in the depths of shock, but the drive over and the quiet of the office building put me on edge, like always. I hated silence, I needed the dull roar of music or some other background noise, and only the Flow State I'd somehow slipped into like a glove yesterday had prevented that from hampering me.

With electric guitars and drums filling the air, I then put in my requests for the day, minimal compared to yesterday. Among them: exercise equipment and a regimen to go with it. I'd tried to work out before, but it hadn't taken. A problem of scheduling and my own mental state. A problem I hoped to overcome with habit. Diet… more easily taken care of with the excess in funding I was now allowed. The recession in the world brought on by Endbringers STILL wasn't as bad as Covid and its aftermath on food prices. For now. I doubted that any of those bastards would go for food production directly, but things were still on a decline.

While the equipment was procured, I set to actual work. I began the process of creating a Digital World. A virtual reality that… acted much like a daisy-chain of neural networks. It would start out intensely basic and small, and slowly build as data was put into it. Data in the form of interacting with itself on set parameters, data from outside, if allowed to connect to the internet, or data from direct injections of files. The Digital World program, as a whole, was one with a purpose: Sorting Information and Using Information to Grow.

The Digital World, itself, was alive. I was programming a living thing that would fill itself to the walls of the server I'd trapped it in. Its original form was something that encompassed the entire Internet, connecting all of humanity that could afford the hardware.

I was going to use it to grow meat-fruit.

Granted, in terms of intellect the Digital World, alone, would never build up the same way as an actual Digimon. Its intellect was a different sort, something more akin to plants and mushrooms than an animal. Deep, vast, but simple, in some ways. Maybe that was just because of how I was making it, and the "real" version… Yggdrasil had existed in the original version. That was where I left that train of thought.

Two hours in, I took a break and bounded up the stairs to examine my new workout space. A stationary bike, a rowing machine, and some dumbbells. Nothing else save a mat to do things like pushups and situps on. It wasn't exactly what I'd asked for, because what I'd asked for had been vague. The regimen I was supposed to follow had been emailed to an account on my mostly-civilian desktop already.

I spent an hour following it as closely as possible, finding that my exercise limits were… still pretty bad. The clock had only been turned back five years or so, by my best guess, not enough to save me from my American fate. It would take effort, but it was mandatory if I wanted to get through this situation alive and sane. Freedom… I'd think about freedom when Thomas Calvert was dead on the goddamn ground.

This was step one of my master plan to make that happen: Get Fit. Become Healthy. Only when I could run with professional capes could I make anything happen. In the meantime, the project I was currently working on and could not conceivably wiggle out of would go as expected. I would develop the Server Farm and DigiManifester, and they would produce meat-fruit and whatever the hell else I wanted. In fact, they would produce foods that were designed, hard-coded, to fit the nutritional requirements of battle-ready soldiers.

I would be eating the literal fruits of my labor within the week. So would many of Coil's mercs.

Then, I would work on my three personal projects, exactly as I'd originally intended, with one major upgrade.

The Digivices would have their own network. One Coil couldn't monitor, because the Digimon housed on them would notice such an intrusion. Tattletale and I would be able to communicate under the excuse of caring for the digital beasts (which was an actual requirement anyways) and the scanners inherent to the devices would prevent them from being accessed by anyone else. Even if Tattletale and I were strapped to tables and had toes chopped off until we caved, the things wouldn't open. Again, the benefits of having living things managing device security.

Right now, that was as far ahead as I could plan. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep making Digimon and Digivices after that, but if I could I didn't intend to without finding others who belonged on the network. Maybe give Skitter a Tentomon? Big Maybe.

Beyond that, knowing how limited my time and options were, I couldn't do much. Not immediately. My long-term plans would vary greatly dependent on what I got and when I got it. I had to just keep trucking along.

So I did. I got back to work on the Server Farm and developed my nascent Digital World until the visualizer program was up and running and could verify the "farmland" was ready to go. That whole process took several days, more than I'd hoped. It took me four days of non-stop work building extra daisies onto the chain of information. I couldn't just copy-and-paste code for it, either, nooooo that would be too simple. It was more like I had to grow a forest tree by tree, and each patch of metaphorical ground was different, so a digging technique that worked on one didn't work on another. Furthermore, each of the trees had to be slightly different, with different needs. Because if everything was the same, the Digital World would just… stagnate. It wouldn't be capable of growing digital fruit that I could harvest and manifest.

So even with Flow State being "on demand", in order to build the Server Farm up to a point where it could produce the output I wanted, it took me four days. That wasn't even including the need for the DigiManifester. Digimon could do this shit on their own if they had access to enough satellite dishes and other tools most cities had. Or rather, if the Digital World had that sort of access. From what I understood most if not all Digimon, while CAPABLE of causing the effect, didn't have the knowledge. Instead, they waited for the effect to begin "naturally" when the Digital World they resided in decided to fuck around and find out. A random flicker in the Digital World, given how connected it was to realspace, would cause "the boundaries between realities" to weaken.

What was actually happening was that the tiny, tiny fluctuations made by the Digital World had a ripple effect on realspace's waves of electromagnetic information. Those ripples cascaded onto themselves, sometimes, and slowly peaked and condensed and focused. At this point, a Digimon could hijack the process and use it to manifest themselves in a "Digital Storm", creating the grey fog effect that conveniently hid them from view for most of the world. The most bullshit and incredible thing about this concept? Full Transfer. There is no disconnect in consciousness during manifestation, and it goes both ways.

A human soul, digitized without being copied and leaving an original behind to be destroyed.

I had to mimic that. It was going to be a pain in the ass. On the flip-side, the device I wanted to build was fully capable of shoving a human through. If I wanted to turn some of Coil's mercs into farmers on the Server? Totally doable.

But god I was going to need more storage space.

I was in the middle of CAD work on the DigiManifester when I got informed via email that my paperwork was all done and I was officially A Person That Existed. Fantastic, I could now acquire alcohol with my "adult" ID that listed me as 22, and my "main" ID was 18.

When I got home that night, I'd almost forgotten about this very important boon until I saw the manila folder on my desk. While I heated up leftovers from a previous meal (pork loin, roasted broccoli, and rice), I went over the details. I had a two different drivers licenses that listed my current address, a passport, a birth certificate, and a W-2 I needed to fill out and return tomorrow to continue the appearances of working for something legitimate.

My income was taxable, as far as the government was aware. The 1500 I was getting every two weeks was the post-tax result. I would actually get to file tax returns in a few months. Again. Joy.

My official job was pretty much right in with the rest of the "prosperous" half of Brockton: software engineer. Truly, a rising star in the industry.

With this all arranged, I was now much more free to go around the city than I had been. I could actually just run around Brockton and have an ID ready for anything that came up. It also came with a card connected to a bank account, run by the Number Man himself. I would choose how much income he got to manage in stock portfolios and the like, in exchange for giving up the minor freedom that cash had given me.

Coil was going through a lot of effort to keep me on his tightest leash. My money was all directly tied to him now, and he'd know if I was withdrawing much. Just wonderful stuff, really.

I sorted out a wallet for myself after finishing up dinner, then considered for the first time since I'd arrived in Brockton what I could do for fun. Back home… I hadn't done much. Shocker of shockers right there, I'd watched anime and played games and maybe read some books, and that was all I needed for entertainment.

But that didn't get me friends. That left me Alone as I sailed the digital sea. That didn't help me now.

I just didn't know anything else. What, go to clubs? Drink? No thank you, the ID was so I could get some cooking wine and maybe an occasional screwdriver for myself. Go into sports? Laughable. I was legally 18 and employed so going to school would be the dumbest decision short of "join coil". Committing crimes… was on the table but would need more prepwork.

I needed a hobby that would actually expand my horizons and the only one that really came to mind was music. Join or form a band.

Bocchi, is that you inside of my soul?

Shit, though, music required money I didn't currently have. I'd have to wait until Digimon was done and dusted to get my next paycheck. Which left me, once again, sitting alone in my room and watching something to rot my brain on my laptop.

Fuck.

While I waited for some heavy-duty tools to arrive - A Lathe and a Mill so I could fab my own parts for things, since these schematics were officially not something most humans could make - I worked on the smaller project. The more important one, in some ways. I worked on the Digivices. The physical tools that would connect human "souls" to their Partners. Not even I knew what the fuck Digivices looked for when identifying their wielders, but these ones could and would be able to be tuned to an individual on a level so far beyond biometrics that there was no way to fool them. They could also only be tuned once. No chance of anyone else getting their hands on this tech. The tech that allowed Digimon that were manifested in the physical world to break down other digimon and thus matter as a whole into raw data and consume it for themselves.

I was not at the point with this technology where I could use that function to put Digimon in and out of their Devices. As such, Tattletale was getting a strictly digital Renamon until I could actually swing it. My own Palmon would also be purely-digital outside of the Workshop, where I would be able to use the DigiManifester to bring her in and out. Once she existed, that is. Only the Dorumon would be primarily physical, and they'd be the last to hatch, saved for Dinah.

All of that was predicated on actually having Digivices to house them, and man were these bundles of circuit boards complicated even before I started trying to cram in extra features.

Fortunately, unlike the DigiManifester, they were still mostly bundles of circuit boards in a tight configuration. I could work on them with just custom-ordered prefab boards, a soldering iron, and the Tinker Magic that was "Flow State on demand, but shard fuckery included". Plus a few other tools not worth mentioning.

The real goddamn magic was that the thermal energy produced by this bundle of digital fuckery was actually being used for a purpose. There was what I was tentatively calling a Thermal Beam Emitter (which I'd made out of a laser diode and some other phone scrap) that collected the heat radiating off the damn circuits and pumped it out as an infra-red data packet. Where did it go? Right into the physically manifested Digimon. What if there was no Digimon to target through techno-magic? It would loop back around on itself with the same tech that allowed it to consume data and put it into the Digimon it housed. That transfer process bled pretty much all the heat either way, thus cooling the thing down.

This meant two things: the Device's natural safety features meant it would not turn on without a "loaded" Digimon, and that if the Digimon was ever Recycled or "killed", the damn thing would start emitting magic smoke and turn into a brick about five seconds later. So despite being able to build the hardware, I couldn't actually use it until I coded up some Digieggs.

The hardware I was adding to it was fairly simple. I wanted to use the Thermal Beam Emitter and some techno-wizardry that even I couldn't properly explain in order to "hijack" existing electromagnetic communications, allowing the signal the Digivices sent out to be used to send information to only something else that could read it. Since the infra-red-based signal was encoded with DigiCode and would generally be difficult to M.I.T.M in the first place… secure communications! Technically this was something they already did, but in its base form it was operating on networks that only existed in the universe of Digimon. I had to ad-hoc things into a state that worked on any signal to piggy-back on.

Techno-wizardry aside, these things would also include cameras, mics, and some other tools to help myself and Tattletale do The Hackerman Thing. I was most proud of an actual GPS system, or something close to it. The base form pretty much just showed where various Digivices were in relation to each other. It gave no concept of local terrain or anything else.

These would use, again, the Thermal Beam Emitter and its accompanying DigiScanner system. They would read off the local EM spectrum, decode it, and present it as Map Data.

Furthermore, the real challenge. Using that same damn system to shield the device from incoming fuckery. The main "target" I had in mind was Shatterbird, because I was not yet in a position to tell physics to fuck off and was still mostly vulnerable to her scream. My boards were silicone. Teaching the Digivice to "eat" any incoming wave energy automatically served two purposes, then. The first was to tell Shatterbird to go fuck herself. The second was to selectively render areas around Digivices "Null Zones" where comms went right the hell out.

The more I worked on that little feature on the hardware side, the more excited I got for the software side. With a Digimon "manning the helm" and judicial use of the Scanner, that function could probably be tuned to only "eat" data that was unwanted. Meaning the enemy's comms were not just fucked but yours to read, and your own comms worked perfectly.

I had a feeling that system wasn't going to work right initially if it worked at all, and thus it was relegated to being on a toggle. I wanted it ready for Shatterbird, but I was dreaming a little too big otherwise.

Maybe next time this whole thing rolled around. If I didn't get better options by that point.

Frankly I was amazed at how bullshit Digivices were, and how insane the Digital World was. It might actually end up being the best possible option for signal-destruction and some other concepts.

Right now, though, it was a pain in my ass that would eventually give me a plant-daughter and all the meat-fruit I could eat. I was not going to be able to finish a single goddamn Digivice today. Or tomorrow. Or…

It ended up taking me the entire two weeks to get everything done. I was down to the wire and had to convince Coil's mercs to give me an extension as I rapidly wrapped up the last of the Digivices in its casing. I'd spent every day with my nose firmly against the grindstone, kicking things off with a workout and then going eleven hours pretty much straight on work. I didn't bother with meals, just a gallon jug of water to get me through.

But I managed it. My own Digivice was already on my belt and loaded with an egg. The other two were loaded but powered down until further notice. The DigiManifester? Complete yesterday, tested with manual "work" from me to maneuver a fruit's "location data" into the portal created, and out popped the first BeefApple abomination of nature. Because of course my first Focus gave me what I needed to violate both the "AI Tinker" and "Bio Tinker" rules. Unfortunately it required grown men to curl up into a ball to actually fit inside. I'd had to scale things down to get it done in time, and as such it was practically luck that a person could fit inside at all. None of the mercs were volunteering for testing that one.

But that was it. In the morning I would wake up with something completely different. I had the Server Farm that would produce various types of food, the three Digivices, and Eggs with the potential to become Palmon, Renamon, and Dorumon. It was a miracle that I'd even managed that much. A miracle facilitated by having Coil on hand to load me up with materials. Otherwise I'd have been lucky to have a single Digivice from scrap and an egg on it that was coded off a laptop.

I was also now realizing that I could very well lose the ability to read my own fucking notes on that scratchpad I had. I wasn't sure, because in theory I should be able to maintain my own equipment and thus fix bugs in code written in DigiCode, but it was possible.

I could be completely fucked overnight. Once again, highly unlikely just because I should be able to maintain the Server Farm and I'd built the IDE for it in the first place, but possible. If that happened, I wouldn't be able to work the Server Farm at all until Palmon was, well, a Palmon.

To say I was nervous on the ride home was an understatement.

So naturally, the world threw me a curveball while I was already stressing. Something I'd known was possible intellectually, but had never actually acknowledged until now. Because I'd gotten home late, I actually got to see the only other occupant of this apartment complex besides the maintenance guys.

Blonde hair in a ponytail, wearing a long-sleeve black T-shirt with a design I couldn't properly see and ripped jeans. She was just slipping in to head home, but she'd stopped when the car pulled up, or at least when I'd taken the hood off and got out.

Great. Face to face with Tattletale after going overboard on Tinkering and being nervous about what my Focus would become tomorrow. This was exactly what I needed, universe. Thank you very much. Exactly what I needed right now. Really, just the best timing for this meeting.

I rubbed at my eyes, groaning and hoping to just get to my apartment without anything happening. The car pulled away behind me I began to trudge towards the door.

"Long day?" She sidled up to go inside with me, I paused and glanced back at her, then shrugged. As long as she didn't make this a whole Thing, it'd probably be fine.

I pointedly ignored Tattletale's habit of making situations into A Thing, and tried to get inside. She allowed it, but she followed me up the stairs, then darted ahead of me. Seeing it in person, I could understand the "vulpine" comparison to her smile. The twist of her lips was smug beyond compare, and I wasn't sure if she'd practiced it in the mirror or if it just came naturally.

"So you're the mystery man the boss picked up?"

"Do you want to come over to my place for dinner? I'm making chicken marsala tonight." I threw the words out, hoping to catch her off guard in some way.

She hummed, thinking the offer over.

"Sure, sounds nice, see you in twenty minutes, new guy."

She slipped up the stairs ahead of me, slinking away on the floor just below mine. I trudged onward to my own home, and only when the door was shut behind me did I let out the long groan I'd been bottling up. I'd just given her carte blanche to pester me for something like an hour, and I had to feed her. And she was a girl in my apartment. I only had twenty minutes to get ready for this.

Shower came first, it was a quick affair. Once I was mostly dried off, I threw on a different set of clothes that weren't misted with sweat and made sure the apartment wasn't a disaster zone. It was still a bit difficult, my lack of glasses was still causing problems. I'd scheduled an appointment with a local doctor next week, but that didn't help me clean up now.

Not that there was much to clean. Wiping down the coffee table and making sure I had everything ready to go in the kitchen was pretty much the extent of it. Couldn't make much of a mess when there wasn't much I owned in the first place. I didn't even have a TV yet, in part because I didn't feel like watching stuff that was going to be loaded with capeshit. Got enough of that from the MCU back home, thank you very much.

With little else to do, I started flattening out chicken breasts with a mallet while I waited for the fox to come to call. My Digivice rested out of the way on the coffee table, the egg within it still unhatched. I was hoping that being present for an actual conversation would feed enough data into it to help that along, though I had doubts.

Just as my violence ended and I set the chicken aside to start working on other things, Tattletale - Lisa, as a Civvie - knocked at the door. I washed my hands and made to answer it. She was wearing much the same as she'd been earlier, with the addition of a set of glasses resting on her nose. I raised an eyebrow, but made no comment to it as I stepped aside to let her in.

"So, do I get to learn your name?" She smirked at me as I closed the door, then glanced around at my apartment. There wasn't much. I hadn't even properly started cooking yet, so that wasn't an easy distraction.

"Edward. Just Ed is fine."

"Great! I'm Lisa, but you already knew that. The boss brief you?"

"Something like that." I hedged. She'd know I was lying, no doubt, but hopefully not the deeper truth. This was why I'd been hoping to put this meeting off for a while. "Anyways, make yourself at home, I don't have much yet, but it's cozy."

Naturally, she settled onto the couch and went for the one thing that was remotely interesting. The Digivice. I closed my eyes and went through the counts for a good, deep breath. My fault, really, for leaving that in easy reach of curiosity incarnate.

"Personal project relating to why the boss hired me." I answered in advance. "I actually have one made for you already, but I left it at the office since I wasn't expecting to see you today."

"So you make…?"

I made a show of glancing around as she flopped over the back of the couch with the Digivice in one hand, currently a brick because I was the only one who could get it to do anything.

"Not sure what the boss told you about me. Not sure what I'm allowed to say." It was true, even, though of course there were layers to it. I wondered if she'd pick up on those. Probably.

"He put us in the same building, he's allowing this to happen." She pointed out. "So, talk, you already know what I can do."

I shrugged, turning away from her and getting back to cooking.

"Tinker. Shift Focus every two weeks. That thing in your hands is technically enough to get me in hot water with the entire world, because it's housing a digital lifeform that can, with the right tools, be converted into a physical one. AI and Bio fuckery in one byte-sized package."

She stared down at my Digivice, with its blue shell and accents of green-gold.

"Huh, doesn't look like much, and you said I'd be getting one?"

"Yup, your own Digital Monster to unleash on the world. One of the last things I was able to make with this stint. Tomorrow I'm going to wake up with a completely different Focus and then go in to talk to the boss about it. That'll be fun."

She set the Digivice back on the coffee table, then rolled herself across the couch like a cat, folding her arms beneath her chin as she continued to talk at me. I had two pans simmering now, one with oil to fry up the chicken, the other with my marsala sauce. On the back burner was water that was boiling up for pasta.

"How'd the boss get you?"

"I got fucked over, was on the verge of starving and none of my Focuses could help me without making me obvious to the city in some way. I flipped a coin on which side to join, and Coil landed heads."

That seemed to get her, she blinked a few times.

"Wow, you're a moron."

"I wish I could just blame the state I was in when I made the decision." I nodded in agreement, pointing a whisk at her. "Unfortunately I only have myself to blame. Making the best of it, though. Coil's professional, if nothing else. I haven't had any problems yet. I can even understand the paranoia, Villains aren't exactly known for long-term solidarity."

"Do you always try to cram five sentences through one breath?"

"Only when I'm distracted."

"Oh? Am I distracting?"

"Nah, just doing two things at once here."

"I'll add oblivious to the moron assessment. That was textbook!"

I paused, ran those words back through my head, and then groaned softly. That got a laugh out of her.

"Thoughtless moron is probably an accurate assessment. Add "just self-aware enough to get into trouble" and a dash of "avoids mirrors" for a more complete picture." I snorted, using tongs to flip chicken through a flour dredge and then into the hot oil.

"Do you actually want people to pity you, or are you trying to drive them off?"

I paused for a moment, chewing on my tongue.

"I don't know. You ever met someone with powers that wasn't fucked up in some way?"

She conceded the point with a snort, giving me that smug smirk.

"You're the one that invited me into your home, you know."

"I know. Fortunately I'm mostly immune to your usual scorched earth social tactics. Can't burn what's already ashes." I grinned back at her, though the expression didn't feel right on my face. Closed-lip smiles were more natural.

"I could probably get around that."

"You won't, though, because I'm feeding you." I put the loaded plate of chicken into the oven to keep warm, dropping the pasta into the water while I worked on cleaning up some of the mess I'd made while cooking. My hair tried to fall in front of my eyes again, reminding me that I needed to invest in proper hair-ties to keep it back. The baseball cap at the workshop was a temporary measure.

"Not as effective as you think, but I'll allow it for now."

"I'll keep that in mind for the future."

The rest of the conversation was kept banal, both of us understood that we were being watched, after all. She told me a little about the Undersiders and their activities (apparently they'd just lost their shot at Spitfire and she was pissed at Faultline), I told her that I'd been working on meat-fruit. As dinner wrapped up, she gave me a contact number and informed me she intended to keep in touch. I waited until she was gone to put it into my Digivice.

It could have gone worse. I'm pretty sure the only thing that kept her from going at what had to be itching in her mind was the fact that we were in a surveilled apartment.

That left me with not much else to do but to go to bed after cleaning up. Go to bed and await what my power would throw at me next.

A/N: The latter half of this "establishment" arc will be less tinkering and more "go outside". If I'm getting anything wrong with either Digimon or Worm (or any future settings for that matter), feel free to let me know and I'll try to correct them!

Last edited: Mar 22, 2023

Burden 1.4

RWBY.

There wasn't even a question about it. No other setting had a scythe that doubled as a sniper rifle, really. I'd woken up with access to the tech-base of RWBY. More importantly, it was a tech-base that included the methods for unlocking my own Aura and creating Dust Crystals (using quartz in its various colors as the base). That felt like a cop-out given by my power, but I wasn't going to question it.

With the tools and time at my disposal… I could probably build a device that would unlock my own Aura, and start screwing around with Dust Crystals. If I wanted to make my own Mecha-Shift weapon… the entire two weeks. Nonstop. I'd have to up my hours to the point of not really coming home and just sleeping at the office. It was one thing to make Digivices that were based in tech from the 90s, it was entirely something else to produce a weapon that was made using metals that were alloyed with a crystalline substance that didn't fucking exist yet. Even before I designed the actual weapon I'd have to produce the metals that would allow Aura to easily extend to enhance it.

Yeah, it just wasn't happening. What I COULD manage was making those alloys and Dust Crystals.

I'd just learned some of the rules of my power, which was why that was making me excited and not disappointed.

I didn't forget the old, I just couldn't create new. I could make DigiEggs, Digivices, Digital Worlds coded in DigiCode, and the DigiManifester. I couldn't make any of the other tech from that world, or really iterate on what I had, but I could continue to manufacture things I'd made before. In theory I'd probably be able to build a larger DigiManifester, that was the largest regret I had.

Didn't really do much for me, though. I didn't have enough time to do that. Not with two weeks ticking away. I had to get samples of every type of Dust I now knew how to create, and ideally figure out how to awaken my own Aura. The power had clearly done something, or else it knew something I didn't, because there were technologies in my head now that could do the job of awakening an Aura. On the same principles as Penny and the soul-transfer stasis pod thing. Except it would use Dust as the initial "spark" instead of an existing person's aura.

Yeah, I had no shot of getting a personal weapon. Much as I wanted one. This phase would be about building the foundations up and probably working the kinks out of the Server Farm. Getting that into a state where one of Coil's guys could go in and handle the actual farming, to the point where the whole system would be out of my hands. Add in Palmon (once they were an actual Palmon) and it would hopefully be producing a steady supply of food by the end of these two weeks. I'd have to fiddle with the data in things, too, in order to make sure the flavor profiles and nutrient compositions were on point.

Honestly, I was just glad to have the damn thing done.

Right now, though, I had to boil this whole new Focus down to its essence and prepare to present it to Coil, so he could make the decision on a major project he wanted. It was also possible he wouldn't want anything from it at all (at least on this shift) and thus I'd be free to focus on other things.

Before even that, I needed breakfast and to prep a lunch. Steak and eggs for the former, leftover marsala for the latter. It was a bit of a rush today, but that was fine, I made it to the door with my lunch in my backpack and a thermos of coffee in my hand.

"Mmm, cofeve." I mumbled as I settled into the passenger seat and pulled the hood from the glove box. I could probably "rebel" mildly by forcing the merc to hand it to me every day or whatever, but that wasn't in my interest right now. I had joined willingly, even if Coil was aware that I had regrets once I'd sobered up from the fugue of my first days. So I put on the hood and exposed enough of my mouth to sip from the thermos as we drove around the city. As always, the route seemed random, but eventually I was guided out of the car and into the same sort of interrogation chamber as before. I set the hood on the table nearby, nursing my drink as the video call with Coil was set up.

"Morning." I pushed the worst of the grog from my mind with the same effort of will I'd use to sober up while otherwise intoxicated. It was a struggle, but it was doable. "How'd you like the… beef apple."

"The food produced by your device seems to be as you described, though my men have noted a strange texture."

"Good, glad I didn't accidentally make poison or something." I stifled a yawn, working my jaw through it. "My new Focus came in while I was asleep."

"Tell me."

I'd already figured out the best way to describe this to him. The Focus of RWBY revolved around Dust and what could be done with it. As far as Coil needed to know, Aura was what happened when a special applicator was used to inject Dust into the human bloodstream, where the para-material began to interact with the body to create all the super-soldier effects. I told him outright that getting things set up to give strength-enhancing forcefields to his men was going to take longer than I had. I could probably set up ONE application of it in addition to laying the groundwork for other things.

That, apparently, was fine. He had no intention of empowering his mercenaries in such a way. It would give up too much of his game. What he wanted instead was to see if I could replace equipment he'd bought from Toybox. The under-rail lasers on their rifles. Just having a working, singular model would be enough to satisfy him and keep me on his take without issue. Any others I made would be bought for a bonus, a fraction of the cost he'd paid to Toybox, but still sizable. We waffled back and forth, but ultimately he was supplying me with a stipend, an apartment, and the actual materials and equipment I needed in order to Tinker. As such, he was going to drag me across the coals and only pay me 750 a pop for my version of the Toybox's lasers.

Wonderful.

On the bright side, this would be my first time seeing another Tinker's work!

Unfortunately, it also meant I wouldn't be building anything crazy (which was just another word for Interesting) this shift. Most of my focus would be on getting tools to get materials to make better tools. The eternal classic. Drill-bits made from Rock Dust steel alloy would put High-Speed Steel to shame, for instance. It was a good way to expand what I could do with Dust-Tech, once I actually had the material on hand.

At least it only needed Quartz as the base. If I'd needed more expensive gemstones I'd have been in a world of hurt. This time, I actually handed off the full list of materials and equipment to Coil's men before we even left his interview room, so I had the starter Quartz and a few other things right off the bat.

Because Dust wasn't just taking existing quartz and futzing with it until it started glowing. This crap had to be GROWN. That was the real kicker that limited my time. I had to arrange specific batches of chemicals to submerge seed quartz in and get it on an accelerated growth cycle. Thankfully those chemicals did not include things like ammonia and bleach. They still required set-up for things like a Fume Hood to work under, a lot of glassware and chemistry tools in general, as well. Moreover, I had to set up each of my four batches in completely different conditions in order to get Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind Dust. Then once I had sufficient quantities of those, I could start blending them in other chemical baths to grow hybrid Dust Crystals…

Which meant once initial set-up was established I was back on other bullshit. In this case I was going over the spec sheet Coil had provided me for the Toybox laser. What it was capable of, how often it needed maintenance, and so on.

Now, this ran into a problem.

In RWBY, the guns exist to enhance the swordfighting. They do crazy recoil things and can stagger Grimm. That's about it. Much like in Bloodborne, guns were a utility, not the main source of damage.

I had to outdo a tinkertech laser attachment with Dust. Practically antithetical to the combat theory of Remnant. I actually understood now why that was: Aura could only enhance a shot for so long, once it got too far away it wasn't empowered anymore. Some Semblances got around that issue, but for the most part range was less effective so everyone built for close-range, high-speed engagements. I could go around that concept, Ruby had built a sniper rifle, after all, but it was more difficult.

I spent most of that day sitting around watching rocks grow while building up schematics for several different options. Those options were sent off to Coil, and he picked the one he wanted out of them based on their projected performance. The one chosen was a model based on the lasers produced by Penny's Floating Array. I now understood the tech that produced those lasers to be based in Wind Dust along with Hard Light. Naturally, the most complicated set-up. It would be the one that took the longest, but it would mean I had to develop pretty much every type of Dust along the way to Hard-Light, which was exactly what I wanted anyways.

Most of the work in the next two weeks, then, would be in managing the growth of Dust Crystals and making alloys. Not mindless by any means, but compared to the involved and complex work of creating the Server Farm, it was far from intensive. Foundational work for future projects. To the point where I was actually willing to cut down on the number of hours I spent in the lab, to ten instead of twelve. I wanted more time out in Brockton, and this was work that would mostly be happening without my supervision. I'd manage the batches at the start and end of my shift, harvesting crystals and setting up new compounds, and the rest of the time I'd be making alloys and getting my workshop set up the way I wanted it.

So it was that I went home early the day after I'd gone home late. This time, I had a package with me. Tattletale's purple-white-and-silver Digivice was going to get handed off to her. Coil knew about it, of course, but we'd long since agreed that it was useful to her and a personal project that he wouldn't pay for. Great way of washing his hands of the matter.

So, when I got home, she was waiting for me at my front door, still out of costume. I led her into the living room and had her sit down on the couch while I took the coffee table as a temporary seat. She was silent as I presented the tool to her, letting her grasp it and blink as I pressed the buttons in a specific sequence, keying the Digivice to her and her alone. The screen flashed white, and then presented a display of her DigiEgg, along with some symbols in the strange script.

"Okay." I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding, presenting my own Digivice. "Now it's yours, you'll be the only one that can get it to turn on its displays or do pretty much anything. Once your Digimon's at its third growth stage - and the egg is stage zero, not one - it won't even turn on for you if you're under duress or… mind controlled or whatever."

She frowned down at it.

"That's- no, not impossible apparently but how?-"

"It's a device capable of projecting and decoding the entire electromagnetic spectrum and then some. Your Partner inside will be able to take that info and make the assessment on whether you should have access to them and their abilities. So don't piss them off either." I smirked, and then ran over the full suite of features with her. The only thing I left out was the fact that it had a truly private network of its own, that was something Coil wouldn't be allowed to hear. As far as he was concerned it would work on existing cellular networks, and any calls made in the "normal" mode would be just that, and thus Coil's typical tactics would work.

Any mysterious texts that Tattletale got could be hidden under the guise of caring for her Digimon. I'd told her as much, that it might buzz when the Digimon needed attending.

As such, once she left, I did exactly that, took care of the egg by using the interface to manage the data it was getting. Being in the presence of someone else becoming a "Chosen Child", such as it was, had been a huge boon to it, by my understanding.

Once I was done with the egg, for the moment, I sent her a message using the "Stealth Transmission" function hidden in the menus and the pop-out keypad. It used a name of choice for ID, which I'd yet to actually put in. I had to consider what I wanted to be my Cape name, and do it now.

Damn the 88 for aping Norse stuff enough that I couldn't just go with that. It would have been so much easier and cooler.

Ah well, flipside to Greek? Infinity?

That'd be… Apeiron.

Nope. No thank you. Not going with that one. Hell nope.

"Ah, shit." I grumbled, getting out my notebook. "This is gonna take a whole fucking list."

I had a lot of crossed off concepts, but I kept circling around one in particular. I knew it was what I ultimately wanted to convey, but how to go about conveying it was the struggle. It was the concept of the Magician, the Tarot kind. As Above, So Below, master of all four suits, so on and so forth. The grand and mysterious Magus.

How the hell do you put that in name form?

Couldn't take Myddrin for the Merlin reference, since someone else had already gone and done that. No way in hell was I going to just take "Magus" or "Alchemist" or anything of the sort. Too generic. I also couldn't get away with anything relating to godhood, both because that would be way too egotistical and because the world at large would laugh in my face for the audacity.

No, something… more subtle than "YWVH" or however the hell it was actually spelled.

Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit, and I knew what to call myself.

Aether: Hello, Tattletale. Be aware that this line is completely secured. Coil cannot learn of this conversation without breaking into one of our devices.

Tattletale: So you chose a Cape name?

Aether: Yes, yes I did. I had to before I contacted you through this, you already saw why since you replied.

Tattletale: You could have just used your normal name.

Aether: This was a good time for it anyways. Enough small talk, though; it's time to bring each other into the fold, as it were. You want Coil dead, and I intend to help.

Tattletale: You know what his power is.

Aether: I also know he uses it to torture people for information. So other than agreeing to kill him and getting each other on the same page, we should avoid knowing too much.

Tattletale: Torture is ineffective as a means of gathering information anyways.

Aether: True. Still risky.

Tattletale: Fine. What's your plan?

Aether: Build up enough personal projects that I can directly locate the real Coil (and not just his body double) and go through the Geneva Checklist on his ass.

Tattletale: Moron.

Aether: I mean if I get the right tech-base for it it's pretty much inevitable.

Tattletale: It's also going to do nothing for the organization that he's built up around himself and the people that support him. You're lucky I just so happen to be in a position to help you make a better plan.

The two of us chatted intermittently for several hours, using the excuse our Digivices provided along with actually managing the eggs. Tattletale's was actually liable to hatch before mine, because she was running through the tool's functions and connecting it to her computer setup in her apartment.

At the moment, she had nothing that she wanted out of me, because my current Focus was too "obvious" to just give to her. Even Coil would get suspicious. Heck, he was probably already slightly curious about why I'd given the Undersiders the power of a Digivice. He was also probably wondering who the third one was going to go to. I'd colored it in black, red, and highlights of gold, but that was to contrast it's intended owner and match the Digimon that was already held within.

For now, it stayed at the workshop. I just had to hope he wouldn't think of stealing it. I doubted they'd be able to get the activation sequence off camera footage, but it probably wasn't as impossible as I wanted it to be. I'd have to tuck it away somewhere eventually…

The next day was once again interrupted with business outside the workshop. This time, I had to go to work, leave, and come back. I had enough time to look over the growth of the Dust crystals and extract the largest ones to use for higher "grade" Dusts like Gravity, Steam, and so forth. Gravity was what I was really interested in, though I needed Electric Dust in order to develop Hard Light, along with some other ingredients.

Really it was a complicated affair that had me making a flowchart. Once I'd made it, though, I realized that technically nothing about Dust required my presence. The goons could set up the chemical batch for them, and it SHOULD work.

That would mean Coil would be able to produce Dust at whatever scale he damn well pleased, but it would also mean I could up my own production to later work into alloys. I wasn't sure how to feel about this, but I decided that I wouldn't tell Coil for now. Better not to give him such a powerful tool, and I could even be wrong about not needing a Tinker to set up the growth pans.

With all of that sorted out, it was on to an eye exam, and then right back to work. My astigmatism was identified and would finally be corrected (something I'd never gotten around to back home), but now everything was blurry and I wasn't going to be getting much done. Those eyedrops were a pain in the ass.

That meant that for most of the day I was waiting for the dilation effect to wear off while struggling through shop work that would build into the work I wanted to do on Coil's new laser attachments. Nothing crazy, I didn't yet have Gravity Dust, so no "Zero-G Environment" fuckery. Yet. Boy was that going to be fun to set up, though, and useful for all sorts of things. Even just making a standard steel alloy in a special environment like that would produce something stronger than anything else currently available on earth. Other Tinkertech notwithstanding of course.

It was when I got dropped off in the afternoon with my eyes going back to their normal level of shittiness that I realized I had options. My paycheck had dropped in (some already taken out for the eye exam and some already set aside for Number Man's Portfolio), which gave me a little under a grand to spend on whatever I wanted. Naturally half of that was set aside for basic things like clothes and food, but the rest?

I could probably go buy that instrument now. Whatever I wanted. A hobby for home. TV would have to wait until next paycheck, but I wasn't bothered by that. I could just… get a taxi and go wherever I wanted. I wasn't at the point of being able to buy a car or anything, but my income was stable and I was producing some absolute marvels in the process. Apply what I should be paying in rent and utilities as part of my income and I was firmly in lower-middle-class.

I could absolutely afford a beginner's instrument of some kind.

I just wasn't sure what to play.

I knew what I loved to listen to, I knew I enjoyed things of the more electronic bent and post-rock was my jam. I could swing towards that.

Or I could prove I was utterly deranged and become a sax player.

Huh, that actually had some appeal. Only slightly concerning.

Or… maybe a cello. Maybe I go back to the instrument I'd once played as a kid, dropped because of course it was.

I poked around with my DigiEgg while I considered it, knowing I wouldn't have a lot of time today.

Wait, I could get EXTRA deranged and pick up something totally obscure that might not even exist in Brockton!

With a chuckle, I flipped my laptop open and started doing a search for people that made Hurdy Gurdies.

Today I learned a simple lesson: Obscure, weird instruments that didn't have entire factories dedicated to their production were fucking expensive. They were also time-consuming to find, were done pretty much on a commission basis, and even the cheapest option I'd managed to discover was to the tune of an entire paycheck.

Fortunately, they took payments in installments and things weren't yet at the stage of the internet where all their reviews were made by bots. Or at least I fucking hoped the internet hadn't been that fucked in 2010. If I got scammed, that would tell me everything I needed to know on that front and I'd no longer have compunctions about unleashing the Digital World onto the net and allowing Digimon to clean those fuckers up.

Well, provided that didn't bring C, Z, and Dragon down on my head.

My instrument would supposedly be ready in about a month. In the meantime I went and composed a personal shopping list of equipment I would want to accompany it, including soundproofing for the second bedroom I had. Here I had to simply hope that this interest wouldn't wane by the time I actually had the instrument in my hands. Like it had so many other times.

With that out of the way, I decided to do something that might be seen as dumb.

Go for a walk in Brockton Bay at night. Just see what was out there in the world. Give my DigiEgg a chance to pick up some new experiences through its home's camera and mic. I didn't intend to really do anything, I just wanted to… explore.

So, throwing on a hoodie and making sure my Digivice was clipped on my belt, I stepped out into the night and hoped my luck wasn't so bad that I'd get accosted by gangs just by existing. Given that Coil and his organization controlled the majority of Downtown, that was unlikely.

The night air was gaining that wonderful crisp chill that said colder months were coming. I breathed it in, letting it settle in my lungs and closing my eyes as I walked for a few steps. Brockton wasn't a polluted mess of a city, despite what had happened to its industrial sector a few decades ago. I was in the "good side" of town, able to walk right past the Towers without anyone giving me shit, even the Empire that apparently lived there. I got to see something I'd only rarely experienced. A full city at night, and not just from the distant suburbs, but in the thick of it.

I'd been a country boy, before this. No place I could remember living in had been as populated as Brockton. It didn't establish itself in a foul stench and gunshots in the night, but in a dull roar of cars, a sea breeze, and the presence of humanity that weighed on me in some way I failed to pin down. It was no sight, no sound, just a pervasive feeling that I was far from alone on these streets, verified by the occasional passerby who chose to walk or take a bus ride.

I didn't really have a destination in mind, but my feet eventually brought me to a club that I'd once considered gunning for. Palanquin. There was a long line to get in, and yet I felt drawn to bother with it. I actually didn't mind the EDM playing, though it was going to be loud for my tastes, if I could hear it from outside the doors. Standing in that line with my "older" ID at the ready, I bounced a leg, wondering what had drawn me here.

Maybe I'd just followed the distant threads of music, since the topic had been on my mind earlier.

I was somewhat surprised that I didn't get bounced at the door, but I wasn't about to raise a fuss in any direction about it. I got through the door, took a moment to adjust to being slammed by the club's music, and made for the bar.

For a moment I considered nursing a screwdriver, as I'd tended to do during concerts and the like. Or a vodka redbull (or whatever the local equivalent was fucking called).

I decided not to do that. I decided to settle in at the bar and let the drinkslinger help me find something else I'd enjoy. My only real input was that I appreciated the rum-based "hurricane" that was so popular in Nola.

And that was how I found out that alcohol that's cocktailed with something that makes me think of blood orange is a fantastic way to get shitfaced.

I didn't somehow meet any important figures, or if I did I didn't remember them. I drank enough to get dumber than usual, dumb enough to get on the dance floor and do the awkward white guy shuffle, and then when I'd had enough that my arms were starting to feel fuzzy I stumbled home and started chugging water.

That was it. I'd gone to Faultline's base of operations, drank myself stupid, and gone home.

But I'd gone outside. I may not have talked to people, but I'd gone outside. It was, to my great shame, progress. A step towards no longer being Alone.

I should have just cut my nipple off and thrown in with the Wards or Protectorate, whichever they thought I fit in. At least then I'd have been forced to interact with people…

These were the thoughts that held me as I was claimed by sleep.

A/N: As stated earlier, the first round of having access to RWBY tech is more about building a foundation of materials and tools than it is about making the crazy mechashift weapons and AI Wai-borgs. There is no guarantee that he'll even get around to building the "Aura Sparker" device discussed in this chapter during this Focus Shift. There is also no guarantee he'll stumble into trouble on his little night-time outings.

To make things perfectly clear: I have no idea what I'm doing!

Burden 1.5

As usual, I woke up without a hangover, though my mouth was absolutely fuzzy and my arms were still a little sore. I still wasn't sure exactly what caused that last issue, but hopefully work and exercise would clear it out eventually. I certainly didn't feel great, but I'd never experienced the pounding headaches and aversion to lights that others described after poisoning themselves like I had.

Eggs, spinach, mushrooms and steak strips, along with a tall thermos of coffee, dispelled any grog that attempted to cling to my mind, and I was soon rolling out with a hood over my face to a workshop I didn't know the location of. On arrival, my first order of business was to confirm I had not done something moronic with the Dust pans.

Gleaming black crystals that had literal weight to their presence greeted me, along with shining piss-yellow rocks that had an aura of static, and some other colors of Dust I gave less fucks about. Excellent, nothing had gone wrong with "advanced" Dust production, though they still required the base forms to be present in order to… blend. God Dust was weird. That meant I could step things up a notch and work towards Hard-Light's final steps. Magnetic Dust was something that the show hadn't touched on and supplementary material only hinted at, but the knowledge in my head said that mixing Magnet or "Metal" Dust with traces of Wind/Air Dust, more Electric, and Fire created Hard-Light. It wasn't something that was going to occur casually in nature very often, making it rare outside of Atlas' factories.

Given its properties, that was a damn given. This shit in even trace amounts was the foundation for a load of communication technology, because Hard-Light Dust outside of it's uses in weaponry was a tool for Signals. The CCT tech that connected Remnant was ultimately predicated on the work of Atlas. Because Hard-Light Dust, in its smallest uses, was actually producing directed light-waves with enough control to be used for instant communications.

Granted, Digimon tech blew it out of the fucking water, but it was still handy to have a substance that could manage Optical Signaling systems the same way cell towers managed their own broadcasting methods. No fragile cables here, no sir!

Setting up a batch of that so that Coil could have his fancy-ass laser systems, I got back to work on my personal project, the Aura Infuser. Name pending, pretty sure I called it something else last time. This was one of the few times where Water Dust was actually relevant, since it would act as the "IV drip" that delivered Dust into my system until I popped my soul cherry and manifested a virginity shield.

Something about that last metaphor rings wrongly to me but I can't put my finger on it in the moment, focused as I am on making sure I do not explode into a pile of meat fruit when I eventually use this theoretical device. My thermos brushes against my lips, delivering its glorious chocolate-y elixir of wakefulness.

Time passes, work is done. The real fun is in the manufacturing process itself, but that can't happen until I have proper Dust Alloy-

I freeze in what I was doing. I was so focused on getting samples of all the Dust types I needed that I forgot the other side of the equation. Swiftly, I rush to rectify that, pushing aside the modeling programs for the Aura Infuser and getting down to brass tacks on how to actually make the materials I wanted. Ratios fill my mind, methods surge through my hands.

I stop planning and start doing. The equipment I need is already here, though the first samples will be jank compared to what I can make once I have a proper Zero-G environment and move my metalwork stuff into it. Right now I just start crushing down slightly-unstable highly-energetic rocks to blend in with pure iron powder and graphite dust in ratios that are only weighed to verify what my hands know and assure the mercs watching over me that nothing will explode. All of it goes into a preheated ceramic cup, and that crucible is set carefully into a ripping hot gas-based crucible.

The process is simple and goes against much of what I know of steel, I'd had some minor experience as a welder and an interest in metalwork long before the cervine mafia sent me swimming with the space whales. This was not how a good steel alloy was created. You did not fucking mix everything in powder form and shove it in a tube to melt unless you were trying to make cast iron. It just wasn't right. This shouldn't work for steel.

But RWBY's Dust laughed in my face and told me to shove the tube in a fire, so here I was, waiting for metal to melt so I could cast it as an ingot using a mold I already had.

Then I did that about ten more times until I had steel samples with pretty much every type of Dust I could imagine wanting in the future.

Then I did that all over again with titanium, at higher temps with longer "cook" times. That was pretty much all I had time for today, I could get fancy with it later.

One of the mercs, at my askance, helped out by managing the crucibles once I'd set up the powder blends, meaning I didn't have to watch metal melt and could focus on the other project I wanted ASAP. Now that I had Gravity Dust I could start putting it to use on creating that Zero-G Environment. I threw together the schematics for the actual room, labeled anything that would run G-Dust as "tinkertech goes here", and shipped it to Coil so he could get me the minor bit of construction that would go into the space. I'd probably end up doing half of it myself, but as the guy behind me that was carefully pouring a fresh ingot of Fire-Dust-Titanium Alloy was proving, help was nice for the more mundane aspects.

Then I was home again, hit with the strangest sense of "hurry up and wait", because I had so much I wanted to do, but I wouldn't be able to do any of it until the next time this Focus showed up. If it showed up again at all. I had no guarantee on that, though it "felt" right.

I passed the time by futzing with my Digivice, hoping the egg would hatch sometime soon. Tattletale's was probably going to go off first, followed shortly by mine. Palmon-to-be over here was only really fed info when I had the Digivice fed into the Server Farm, because that's where I wanted it to feel at home. That's where I wanted it to Know how things worked, in a way that no human transplant would. Meanwhile, Lisa was raising her potential Renamon on the information of the Internet, curated through what she considered actually important. There was a lot more information there than what the Server Farm could offer, but mine was "older"-

It was complicated, but hopefully they'd be hatched soon, and hit the growth spurt to "Child" stage shortly. Even in "In-Training" they'd be fully capable of talking, which would be a boon, but the Child or "Rookie" stage was where they'd come into their own. That was the point where they'd be able to help out in the field.

Of course, the DigiEggs didn't need nearly as much care as I was giving mine, which was why I wasn't actually giving mine more than it needed. This was just a pretext to continue communicating with Lisa covertly. Not much, just a check-in to confirm some aspects of our overall strategy. Time was a large factor, because she needed a lot of it to pull off what she was currently managing. Time and money. She was going to buy Coil's entire organization out from under him. In order to help that along, any tool that got into Coil's networks was helpful. Any method of routing information discreetly to her was also appreciated. Any way of making shittons of money? Very much appreciated.

My current deals with Coil and the strict time limit on my Focuses were getting in the way of all that. October was almost over, I had a little over five months or so to get ahead of the night Taylor first went out in costume. She hadn't even triggered yet, actually. The chance to nip Coil in the bud was there, but it was slim. It would require a lot more stress out of me than I was usually willing to put up with. Even with the Flow I had on-demand access to, that was a shitload of work.

The alternative was just letting things happen. That was how I'd lived life in the past, but in the past I didn't know the consequences in advance. I didn't know exactly how fucked things were if left alone back in my old life. Here, I knew what would happen if I let myself relax. I couldn't leave it alone, people needed help that only I happened to be in a position to provide.

Laying back on my couch, I rubbed my face with a free hand, Digivice dangling from a wrist strap on my other arm. I knew just enough to get myself into trouble, here. If I went off half-cocked again I'd do something even dumber than "join coil", and while that would be a spectacular shitshow, it would also end with me in a set of concrete shoes at the bottom of the bay. Or else in the birdcage. Or in a C lab somewhere. Really there were any number of shitty fates waiting for me, a whole multiverse of wonderful options where I got fucked both metaphorically and sometimes literally!

I would like to avoid those fates, thank you very much.

Before I could start running circles inside my skull, I pulled out my notebook and used it as a method to organize some of the chaos. The blank page taunted me, but I was determined to mark it up. I worked through short-term goals that I could achieve irregardless of my current Focus. Break it down into steps…

Step numero uno: Get a fucking day off.

From there, I'd get a library card (they only let you get cards during the day, but the Library was open in the evenings as well since this was a big city), and do some research. Start checking out books to read, not just ones about obvious concepts like engineering, electricity, and so on, but History. I needed to know the world I lived in as if I'd actually grown up here. Some things could be excused by clearly having a shitty life and blowing into town recently. Other things would eventually be asked of me that I wouldn't have context for.

Things like media. God that was going to suck. I had no interest in endless capeshit, but if I didn't engrain myself into the cultural zeitgeist, I'd stick out like a sore thumb. With no easy explanation besides "living in the boonies", which would only stretch so far.

I'd thought being back in 2010 would mean I was back to being up-to-date on young slang, but though "cap" and its ilk were still a decade out, I hadn't accounted for how capes would affect things. Earth Bet was a world that had been inundated with capeshit since the 80s and ate it up. C helped that along, making sure it didn't lose steam like it really should. I had to cope with that.

And to top it all off, I was still fucking Alone. What the FUCK had I been thinking joining Coil instead of the Wards… I didn't even have friends to watch shitty movies with me and make them entertaining anymore.

Nope. That's enough angst right fucking there. I told my brain to shut the fuck up and get back to work. Besides "going native", I wanted to research the local cape scene and see if the living, breathing version of Brockton was any different from what I knew. The Merchants didn't even fucking exist yet, for instance, it was just known that the drug dealers were starting to cooperate with each other instead of purely competing up by the Trainyard on the north end of town. Skidmark and his collection of morons wouldn't really show up until right before Leviathan, in late April.

Other stuff to be aware of included the fact that Panacea was a more recent Trigger than I'd imagined. She was actually just now coming into prominence and starting to grind herself down as a healer. Shadow Stalker had pretty much joined the Wards right before I woke up in the city, too. Things I took for granted as "part of Brockton" were actually fairly fresh and unstable from this perspective. Shit, the Empire was nothing like what I seemed to recall. It was on the downturn, Night and Fog were in Boston, Purity was a solo act, Crusader and several others were scattered. It was fucked in naziland. Good, but it still emphasized the point: I could not and should not make assumptions on my knowledge. Doing that was going to lead me tumbling down faster than I could say "Kum Susser Todd." or however it was pronounced.

"Heh. Sus." I palmed my face again, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

Jesus christ. I was priming myself to join Panacea in the batshit breakdown category and maybe even do it without needing the Nine to get on my case.

Unfocused, giggling at stupid shit, going on a wild alcoholic bender, creating the foundations for weapons of mass destruction… was I sure Z hadn't already gotten to me?

"Nope." I slapped myself, that way lead actual madness. I had no reason to believe Z was involved in my existence right now.

Focus. Come on, Ed. Just fucking think straight for two minutes. Library card, laptop research, what else was I going to do to bring Coil down before everything REALLY goes to shit? What can I do on the tech end, with access to everything from RWBY?

Not a whole lot, right now. Just keep building that foundation and inject myself with Aura. Get some exercise, eat healthy, become stronger. That was pretty much it right now. Tinkering wasn't some instant solution to all my problems.

On the bright side, my chest wound had finally healed up to the point I felt okay taking the bandage off. No tattoo, no nipple either, just a weird patch of flesh there now. Give it some time to match the rest of my body and I'd be able to wear one-shoulder togas while being hollywood photogenic.

Again with the deranged lines of thought, I was pretty sure this wasn't even the work of a Shard, I was just… like this. Sometimes. It wavered on how bad it got, and my situation wasn't helping, but there was nothing to do but power through and try to use habit to curb idiocy.

Other than that, back to the grind.

The rest of my time with the RWBY focus went pretty much as expected. Building up a stockpile of Dust Alloys, Dust Crystals, and developing the Zero-G Forge, a room that would take up the center of the first floor and further contain options for vacuum work given some more time. The Forge was set up with only four days to go, but that was enough time to do the work I wanted. The Hard-Light Laser Attachment was fairly simple, once the actual Dust was available to me. It wasn't a perfect match to the spec-sheet I'd presented Coil at the start, but it was close enough to say any inconsistencies were more to do with flaws in materials and work than actual design.

In the evenings, I tore through PHO, the history books, and other information besides. I had to set alarms to manage when I actually went to bed and shut everything down, otherwise my habit of getting too deep into reading was going to fuck me over. I had yet to miss a (full) day at the workshop for any reason, I was not going to be late if I could help it. Accord, Coil might not be, but he still respected professionalism. The less reasons I gave him to go after me, the better.

Only after I'd turned in the first Underbarrel laser did I actually get a set of glasses. With those, I could trust my own fucking eyes again, and work on the Aura Injector went much smoother.

Working inside the Zero-G Forge was a wild ride. Everything had to be clamped down in some way, otherwise it would just fly off and bounce off the walls until it gave me more brain damage than I already had. The sense of weightlessness when the G-room was active, and the way we could just step in and out of the field, fascinated both myself and the mercenaries assigned to watch over me. Though we still only rarely spoke to each other, I now had at least one hanging around and looking more closely at what I was doing whenever I was in the G-room, typically floating out of the way near the ceiling.

Nothing had weight, but inertia still existed, as did air friction. Heavy materials still took some effort to move from station to station, and the superheated fluid of molten metal being cast into parts was a complicated affair.

But I got it done. I had produced a device that looked like some sort of metallic spider, made from cast aluminum/magnetic dust alloy. That meant it had a magnetic clamping action with itself, charged by simple electric energy. Furthermore, it had clamping force that would hold me spread-eagle against a wall so I didn't thrash and kill myself during the process.

I had a funny little feeling that this whole thing was going to hurt, so I'd made the applicator into a medieval abomination so my squeamish ass couldn't run away. I'd gotten lucky with somehow tricking myself into thinking cutting into my body was okay to get rid of that stupid fucking tattoo, I doubted I'd be able to pull it off again unless I got caught up in some real SAW shit, and possibly not even then.

Hence why I was currently pinned to a worktable while a set of IV needles hung over my neck, wrists, and thighs. It was going to suffuse my bloodstream pretty much all at once with a saline solution of Dust, and then my soul was going to start screaming until it created a no-touchy-zone over my body.

I was exaggerating, simplifying, and making light of this mostly to give myself time before I hit the plunger.

Jesus christ, what had my life come to?

I gave myself zero additional time to think on it and squeezed down on the trigger in my left hand. It dropped out of my palm almost immediately afterwards, but I wasn't focused on that. I was sort of getting stabbed in five places at once with big needles that were pumping me full of magic juice. The magic juice felt like lightning, something I actually had experience with! A fuzzy sensation that carried with it muscle spasms, slowly rising agony akin to a leg cramp but in my everywhere, and also I was heating up like I had a fever.

All told, an absolutely wonderful time! I wasn't screaming at all! I actually couldn't scream because my lungs had locked up and I was barely able to breathe! It was great!

Sadly, the fun had to stop after only a minute or so, as the entire machine was forcibly disconnected and the needles ejected to spray their glowing magic juice onto the table in little dribbles. The thing that saved me? Me. My soul. A glowing blue-purple field that coated my body like a second skin, something that felt so natural it didn't even bother me to instantly get up and pack the Aura Injector down into a smaller form with it "active". I actually had to take the mental step back to accept that I'd been successful, because I didn't feel too different.

Just comfortably warm.

That feeling faded on its own, when I stopped paying attention to it, but it left me feeling fresh and sharp. Like caffeine but with more potency and less drawbacks.

That was all a vast simplification of having a soul that actively aided the body, but it's what I felt in the moment. Even understanding the weight of what I'd done, it just felt… like it was normal. Maybe that was just how Aura was, it was your soul after all, it was you. It wouldn't exactly feel monumental or special, not all at once anyways.

With that project done, though, and a full extra day (with some leftover time today, even) on the clock, I set about earning myself a bonus, manufacturing three more of those Hard-light lasers that Coil wanted. They came with a basic maintenance guide that showed how to recharge it with Dust, how to keep it clean, and so forth. Anything more serious (such as the equipment taking battle damage) would have to come back to me to repair and replace parts. Hopefully nothing major.

That netted me an extra fifteen hundred on my paycheck, enough to actually do something. Put down a payment on that instrument, spruce up my little apartment.

I was becoming keenly aware that the low stipend was to keep me on a tight leash. If I wanted money to gain more independence, I had to provide work to Coil. I could only provide so much work in each two-week shift.

Circles, again. I elected to focus on other matters during my last few hours with the RWBY Focus. Fashion was deeply entrenched in the world of RWBY, and a mundane outfit could be designed and then ordered in later by Coil, if I presented it to him. The basis for a costume.

That way I could go out and actually fucking do something, instead of just being a basement tinker for a fucking scumbag I'd thrown in with on a whim.

Fuck me for being terrified of having choices taken away from me. I should have had it taken from my hands, because in hindsight I made the wrong one, but here I fucking was. I would work with what I'd given myself.

Circles, again. I was having to remind myself of that more and more as the month wore on.

Maybe I should get a therapist.

Hah, even working for a supervillain doesn't get me enough cash to afford a therapist. Probably not intentional, just a knock-on effect of being kept on the poor side of things in general.

If only I was moronic enough to not be self-aware of my own idiocy-

Circles, AGAIN.

I was having one of these mini-breakdowns on the couch or in the shower every few days, now. Something was going to give. I was going to do something dumb. I could feel it, the butterflies in my stomach as various plans that I KNEW were stupid built up and demanded action of some sort.

I threw on my hoodie and headed out into the night. Back to the Palanquin. Plan was simple: shut my stupid brain up with booze and hope that tomorrow's new Focus would give me something to further distract myself from making more major mistakes so I could dig- no, so I could CLIMB out of this hole. Digging myself out would just mean going deeper.

I jogged, it wasn't frantic, but it was from casual. I just needed to move, to get the goddamn tension out of my body until I could drown the swirl of retarded ideas in my head. None of them were viable, if I gave any of them any thought I might actually give in to them. I might actually think it was somehow a decent fucking idea to just turn myself in to the Protectorate.

No thoughts, then, just empty my mind by pounding pavement on a trip to the club run by a bunch of mercs.

Faceplant into someone because I was too focused on myself and not focused on where I was going.

As we staggered back from each other, I pushed a hand against my glasses to steady them, holding out my other hand to try and ward off the angry rant I deserved.

"I'm sorry." I muttered, trying to slip past the mystery man.

"No you're fuckin not, but you will be, little shit."

My head snapped up, taking in my enemy in a heartbeat. I didn't instantly recognize him as somebody from a major gang, he wasn't wearing the red and black of E88 or the red and green of ABB. Just some dude that had muscles where I was still trying to develop them, and what looked like a roll of quarters wrapped in duct-tape.

"Money, bitch, unless you wanna crack your jaw."

My body flashed cold, I forced my eyes open. Tried to really look at what I was dealing with. He was about my size, but clearly ate less and worked out more. Slightly thinner, most of it was muscle. I'd already noticed that and needed to find new details but I had no time because he was opening his mouth again-

Warmth blossomed across my body as my forearm slammed into the neck of the man, clipping his shoulder. He was sent staggering to the side, catching himself before he spilled onto the street and coming back with a punch. I only knew it was a punch because the glowing purple-blue field around my body caught it. I hadn't even really seen the attack coming, he'd just lurched towards me and then I was taking a step back from the force of it.

The moment of confusion he got from seeing the brief flicker of my Aura was enough for me to drive a knee into his gut, though. As he fell over, I switched legs and leaned forwards before swinging my entire body into a soccer kick that caught him in the ribs. He went sprawling into the street.

I didn't give it any more thought, I just ran away after that, scurrying to back roads and letting go of the warmth of Aura to leave myself flushed with the chill of panic. I tried to act casual, but I'm sure I only got away with it because it had been such a brief "fight" and I'd taken some back roads.

Another twenty minutes of that saw me at the Palanquin and waiting in line. Another ten minutes in line saw me Alone at the bar.

Pumping music to drown out the thoughts in my head and alcohol to slow them down. Two visits in and this was already becoming one of my favorite places.

Just… had to pace myself. That was all. Nothing would go wrong if I restricted this to a weekly thing. Right?

I let that thought get washed out with all the rest as I sipped on a sweet, burning cocktail.

Author's Note

Some of you are confused. I hope that this chapter sheds some light on that confusion, and clears up the misconception that this SI is anywhere approaching competent.

The power is a crutch. Without it, Edward amounts to nothing. He is a person with capital I Issues and no easy way to fix them even before he got sucker-punched into another world. I chose to make him a Tinker of Fiction because it was an excellent reflection of how he wanted to solve all his problems. Even with all the power of Fiction at his hands… he's still this. As he put it earlier, even being hooked up to an inter-dimensional meat computer didn't fix his "stupid" problems.

If you were expecting a story where the SI makes good choices and is generally cool, suave, and handles himself, let this disabuse you. His thought processes might not always make sense, but he has his own logic that's leading him down this road. (And on the "cut his nipple off" thing, he had to set himself up for a situation where he COULD NOT LIE. That was his particular logic at the time. He knew what the C really meant, and he could not remember how he got it. He had to be able to present himself to other people without that question being asked at all). Whether his power helps him crawl out of the hole he made in his first 24 hours or not is something I hope keeps you all engaged, because it's absolutely not a sure thing.

Burden 1.6

I once more woke up at home, having stumbled back on foot without running into any issues. Once again, my body felt fine, and I remembered everything that had happened last night. Not perfectly, but about normal. I honestly didn't know what the fuck people did to get "blackout drunk", because the closest I've come is actually taking a nap while under the influence.

I hope I never learn what that's like.

Aura seems to have mitigated the costs of my excess even more than usual, my mouth is dry again, but my arms don't feel sore. In fact I feel better, physically, than I have in a while. I know intellectually that just having Aura, even if on Remnant I would be a glass cannon, is enough to let me shrug off bullets. Maybe not a lot of bullets, but a few. I'm bulletproof, I heal, I'm physically enhanced to anime scales.

All in theory. In practice right now I could tank a punch without feeling it and kick a guy a few feet into the air, which in hindsight was probably a bit much for someone that didn't have powers. So on top of everything else I was going to be busy with, I was going to have to train not just to get stronger, but to control that strength.

Speaking of the "everything else", I finally allowed myself to sink into the schematics and concepts my power had presented me. I wanted to know what I was working wi-

I was out of bed and throwing the fridge open to get my morning routine started before the blanket even had a chance to fall back down. I did not need coffee today, raw excitement would be my- actually I'll take the coffee anyways just to keep the habit up and not deal with the fucking withdrawal symptoms again. I really didn't need it though, I was wide awake and actually struggling not to cackle like a madman.

95% of my current tech-base was completely out of reach. There was no way I could get the infrastructure required to build most of it.

But I knew what I had on my hands and I knew exactly what I wanted out of it as a personal project, something I could build in two weeks with room to spare if I focused down on it. Assuming Coil didn't rain on my parade this morning.

I wouldn't fucking let him. I had access to the tech-base of an intergalactic madhouse. I had the full knowledge of Gadgetron, Megacorp, Vox Industries, Grummelnet, the Blarg, the Lombaxes-

I froze again, gasping. There was one critical technology for that last one.

The Dimensionator. The tool that could-

I was going to get caught up in impossibilities, but damnit, this was the most powerful (and personal favorite thus far) Focus I'd gotten. Ratchet and Clank. That two-week restriction on my power felt like a lead weight around my neck, there was just so much I wanted to play with from this goddamn series. If I had to pick only one thing to build, though, I knew what it had to be.

Lombax Hoverboots.

It wasn't even a question, this was the first time since I'd woken up on Earth Bet that I actually felt anything resembling a "dream come true" quality. I had Aura to protect me from crashes and enhance my reflexes, I could make hoverboots actually work. They wouldn't be true personal flight, but fuck that, they didn't have to be, I didn't want that. I wanted to blitz at highway speeds down a road while wielding dual vipers in a firefight against Armsmaster.

I probably wouldn't actually get to do that for any number of reasons, but if I didn't build hoverboots now I'd never forgive myself.

I was not obsessed, I was totally rational in wanting this massive mobility upgrade that would actually provide a bit of fun to my grindstone of a life. Sigma males the world over would probably be proud of my ass right now and that was the last thing I wanted, so fuck everything else, I could spend two weeks making hoverboots just for goddamn fun.

I shoveled breakfast into my mouth at messy speeds, wiped myself off with a damp paper towel, and threw everything into the trash.

Then I had to stop and pull the plate out and put it in the sink where it belonged. Christ.

Getting a bit of a hold over myself and calming down, I grabbed my thermos and descended the stairs towards where the car would soon arrive. Two flights down, I had to run right back up so I didn't forget Palmon's Digivice. And my backpack with my notepad, and a lunch.

Jesus, so ready to go I wrapped right back around to being almost late. I didn't begrudge myself for it, though, I had avoided actually being late, and that was the important thing. Car, hood, drive. Coil's little meeting room again, to go over what I'd just picked up.

I had to fumble for the right words, in a mixture of excitement and awe at the sheer breadth and depth of what I could do right now.

"I… theoretically, ships that can dive into stars and black holes without taking serious damage from the forces at play, nanotech that rivals Panacea's healing, can upgrade weapons the more they're used, enhance a person's body and armor… it's the full tech-base for a civilization that's bordering on post-scarcity. A violent one, too, I have weapon schematics in my head that would make the protectorate label me an S-class. The problem is that it's all theoretical. I only have two weeks and the Grav room isn't nearly enough to work with some of these things." I rubbed my temples. "A lot of the more impressive stuff needs elements that don't exist on earth, found on exoplanets with extreme conditions that create stable isotopes of elements with Atomic numbers well over a hundred. I can, in theory, replicate those, but not with what I have right now. Or I can hackjob it with nanotech, but for that I would need nanotech… which I also cannot make with what I have."

"You seem excited regardless, tell me, what can you make?"

"Personal project is going to be hoverboots. Beyond that…" I turned things over in my head, going over what was possible. I'd have to commit hard if I wanted the hoverboots within my two-week timeframe, because I had to "reinvent the wheel" and redo Zero-G tech without the "easy mode" of Gravity Dust. The schematics were in my head, but actually getting them into realspace would be a process.

I turned my mind back to what else could be made with what I had. What did Coil want?

Actually, that was a great question.

"It would be easier if I had an idea of what you currently want, sir. Ignore what I can and cannot make, what would you be trying to secure from, say, Toybox right now, if I weren't here?"

He rubbed his chin on the other side of the screen, contemplating that question.

"Beyond more of your laser attachments, what I desire most, at the moment, are tools to gather information. I'm told the device you gave to Tattletale will pay dividends on that front soon, but if you can do more…"

The question brought schematics to the forefront of my mind. Schematics I hadn't thought were possible without nanotech, but apparently could be managed. Doing those two devices in addition to a set of Hoverboots inside a two week period? That was…

My foot bounced as I considered it, leaning back in my chair to look at the ceiling, a hand raised to my face to adjust my glasses and brush through my hair. Forgot the hair-tie, damn.

Wait, hang on. Those tools required satellites or other supplementary sources of information to work. The Map-o-matic's main function was to add to existing map data. The map itself wouldn't work without something to scan the area, the Map-o-matic just communicated with those scanners and added its own "hypermatic" - which was trademark bullshit for a new and exciting type of radiation that was harmless to most organic and synthetic life - signals onto it to find valuables according to the user's settings.

In other words, not currently possible. All the "radar" (it was not actually fucking radar, video games lied) systems that would show up on HUDs in later games were also reliant on various scanning techs I…

Well maybe if…? I could make those components, but…

Shit, that wouldn't be something I could auto-pilot, though. Putting a DigiScanner system into something like the Map-o-matic would give it a short-range version of its original functions, but it would take some work to make those systems compatible.

"I make no promises, but I might be able to get you a mapping system that will reveal things like hidden bunkers that I'm sure just dot this city. Time crunch is the main issue. It would also be unfortunately short-range, you'd have to send one of your men out with it to actually build the initial map, calibrate it, and so on. As for making laser modules, I can get you another… three. Guaranteed, then I work on my other projects."

"Do not forget your assurances regarding the system you call the Server Farm."

Shit, right. I hadn't done much with it, still waiting for my digimon to hatch to make it easier…

"I'll get on it." I sighed. "You'll have your food production up to spec by the end of this Focus shift."

Unsustainable hours, here we come. I don't care what it costs to get my hoverboots.

"Good. I believe we are done here then. I look forward to the delivery on your promises."

The laptop went to a black screen, and I was whisked off to my workshop. Before anything else, I held myself to my goals, and went through the exercise regimen. Aura made the aftermath less uncomfortable, dragged the concept of "recovery time" out back and shot it in the head, and let me get right back to work after giving myself a quick wipe-down.

I was probably going to lean on it as a crutch to keep me going for a while, but that was okay. The purple-blue glow, its comforting warmth, and the knowledge that I would soon be able to keep up with after-market street racers all tied together to keep me focused. Something I actually wanted, instead of just throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something stuck.

It was nice. It made the drudge work of the three lasers actually fun. I found myself mesmerized by my own work in a way that I simply hadn't before. Faint rock music in the background, working a lathe's handles to make chips out of a part, I found myself smiling a little. I didn't feel like I was just throwing myself into the flow state to shut myself up.

It wasn't a perfect turnaround, but it was a good day.

Maybe it was because, knowing I could have access to this Focus, I was now actually able to form a plan to deal with… everything.

In the relative privacy of my apartment, I curled up on a couch and went over my DigiCoded notebook. I'd scribbled down a lot of ideas, refined them. Found some hope and talked back and forth with Lisa on how to make it happen. The same Map-o-matic and "radar" tech that allowed Ratchet to track incoming enemies and find secrets was PERFECT for finding Coil wherever he hid. Even if I didn't get that exact model I had planned up and running, Lisa would soon have a Renamon capable of running through the internet to find the bastard. Knowing his civilian identity was a big boon, too, but we'd catch much more flack for doing that. The unwritten rules, as Lisa had argued.

As such, we had to find his actual base, where he was hiding, when he was going to split a timeline, and so forth. Things that were possible, but things that would take time. The body-double also complicated matters, but unbeknownst to Lisa, she'd already done all of this shit while also putting up with an Endbringer attack and the Nine. Now she had access to a tool that would rapidly escalate her ability to collect data and funding once it hatched and got some proper training.

Once Coil was dealt with, assuming it could be managed before April, canon would pretty much completely collapse. C would come sniffing around wondering who'd killed their snake, presumably, but now I had an ultimate plan to deal with them as well.

Draw Fedora out, then pop the Dimensionator to airdrop myself into Doctor Mother's office and deal with that issue. Doormaker might be faster than me, but… it was possible. I didn't expect to be able to make it possible for a while, but it was possible. I was currently debating whether or not to work with Cauldron, however briefly.

Scion was a more difficult problem, but I could build options. Eventually. Having access to a Dimensionator was much the same as having access to Doormaker. I'd be able to set myself up on, say, Earth Gimel. An empty place to scale myself up…

Thinking too far ahead? Maybe. I knew I had to deal with this shit eventually, though. I wasn't going to be able to ignore it. I had goals, goals that had seemed overwhelming… until I'd engaged in a classic form of therapy and talked the bartender's ear off last night.

He'd offered me some pretty simple advice as he helped me get shitfaced again.

" Sounds like you're in a shit situation, friend, but it ain't so bad. Really, you got sea breeze whenever you want, your work's got rough hours and a shit boss, but you sound like you like the job, and you got the money to enjoy good food, good drinks, and good times. Pick up a hobby, make some friends, and I'd say you'd be doin better than nine tenths of this city."

The booze had helped me set aside my panic; they didn't call it liquid courage for nothing. The bartender had given me the frame of mind. Waking up with the power to make hoverboots had sort of… helped set those in.

I was being a little bitch, but I could stop. Maybe not all the time, but I could stop and reframe things. Like now, like last night. There was hope here. I mean shit, I had access to RWBY and Digimon even before all the madness I might be able to get up to with R as a Focus.

Not an immediate turnaround, it was hard to get rid of the worry about Coil making me talk with drugs and torture, and I sure as shit had fucked up in my initial panic, but… like he'd said. Better than nine tenths of the city.

Once the snake was dead I'd even get paid by Tattletale instead, which meant an actual paycheck worthy of what I brought to the table!

Nightly introspection set aside, I got up to mill around my kitchen and put together some chimichangas, and check an email from the girl that was making my Hurdy Gurdy. I shot off a payment to her after taking a look at the "work-in-progress" pictures of rough wood that would soon be assembled into the fine instrument.

Hobby would help. Friends… would be more difficult to get, though. Maybe the Undersiders, maybe the bartender at Palanquin, maybe some people that weren't even on my mind right now. It was an Eventually sort of thing.

For now, I just enjoyed my fried burrito and my calm night.

At least until the Digivice started buzzing and glowing.

In hindsight, it made a lot of sense that the DigiEgg would only hatch when I showed something resembling positivity. That was a running theme with Digimon, after all, that the bond with their Tamers was important and giving in to the "inner darkness" was going to trash that. They needed positive data, not just… yeah.

On my Digivice's screen, a black orb covered in white cottony fluff with big eyes danced around, the egg it had been long since gone. I'd hooked a USB into the Digivice and my laptop, using the latter to download webpages and PDFs about nature conservation efforts, farming, and other stuff I thought would be good "food" for the little fuzzball.

They couldn't talk yet, but they'd be able to eventually. They should grow fast now that they were out of the egg stage. Right now they expressed themselves with just their eyes and their floating behavior. Given how much I was feeding it, it was pretty happy, though after only a few good chunks of info, they started looking queasy and backed away from the side of the screen that had the port. I stopped then, and it slowly relaxed and "digested", returning to its happier expression.

Cute little thing. This was pretty much exactly what I'd been waiting for to start fine-tuning the Server Farm and get it to actually output like I knew it could. My Digimon was chosen specifically because of its affinity for the job, above all else. After all, once Coil was dead, this would be how I fed myself for the most part. My Palmon… that wasn't a Palmon yet… would love it, I was sure. It probably needed a name so my thoughts got less confusing, though.

I wasn't sure on the ethics of naming Digimon. Most of them seemed to just go by their species names, but then they did that in Pokemon too. I decided that once my Yuramon had evolved and could talk, I'd ask it how it felt about a nickname.

With everything in order, I cleaned up and headed to bed, ready to take on tomorrow.

The workday started with a temporary kitchen being established around the Server Farm while I worked on getting more of its product output. Yuramon was not the immediate help I'd hoped, since they'd injected themselves into the Farm and then basically burrowed into the ground on the visualizer and stayed there. I had to futz with code on a separate monitor I'd hooked into the server in order to get anything done. The mercs behind me were serving as test subjects, though none looked terrified like I might have expected. I guess the first sample had gotten around, and they knew that it wouldn't be poison.

A few hours later, I left it all alone and let the mercs work their way through the samples I'd produced, returning to the work on the Laser attachments and keeping an ear out for their feedback.

A camp stove and cutting board on a plastic folding table worked through "fruits" that were loaded with meat-data and thus had properties of beef, pork, chicken, and against my better judgment, halibut. The fruit-fruits were easier, and actually vaguely resembled their real counterparts, with apples, oranges, and watermelon serving as the examples there. Then I had giant carrots, potatoes, onions and celery output, and that was it so far. Nothing would be eaten raw, though I knew that the food wouldn't suffer the same problems that "normal" food did. There wouldn't be any viruses in those products, it simply wasn't possible with how I'd created them.

While I fitted parts together that I'd milled yesterday, the soldiers of fortune worked their way through the buffet. Apparently I still had that texture issue with the meats, where they had texture profiles more akin to fruit than actual meat. Everything else was fine.

They'd have to live with the texture "issue", at least until Digimon's Focus rolled around again. I wasn't confident in my abilities to edit those "plants" without it. Maybe Yuremon/Tanemon/Palmon would be able to fix it, or maybe the soldiers would just get used to things being a little weird.

I kicked off and rolled across the linoleum on my office chair, taking the work with me in my lap and reaching one of the benches that held my current reserves of Hard-Light dust. Ground down into fine powder, the glassware full of glowing cyan Dust probably would have engaged me more if I still had the RWBY Focus. As it was, I was moving without really thinking, zeroing out the cartridge that would go into the laser on a scale and slowly filling it with the appropriate amount of Hard-Light. I'd have to make some more of that soon…

I wasn't sure if it was the nature of my power, or the nature of me, that made it so easy to get used to the fantastical stuff like this. Maybe I just had bigger problems.

My lips twisted at that thought, and I put it out of mind, going back to the comfortable feeling of fitting parts together. A hex-key spun in my fingers, tightening down the compartment that held the Dust, making it so that the attachment was officially Armed. Hard-Light Dust, focused through a mechanism that used a trio of Wind crystals to effectively aresolized the substance in the same moment it was energized by the magnetic field inside the device. Once active, it gets pushed through a lens, and the thing it's pointed at gets a nasty laser beam put through it. Rated to punch through standard PRT plate carriers, up to a half-inch plate of steel, and theoretically it would ignore Forcefields that allowed light through them, though that would still weaken the beam.

I wasn't sure if it would actually work like that and Coil had yet to test it on anyone. I imagined New Wave was going to be displeased with it if it worked as I thought.

One down, two to go, I rolled over to check in with my Digimon and make sure nobody was dying among the mercs.

"So it's good?" I asked, trying to make conversation. I realized dimly that this was pretty much the first time I'd ever really said anything to the four mercs that staffed my workshop. Maybe five or ten words a day, most of that being putting in orders for materials, since Coil refused to have that sort of thing done digitally. Given the number of explosive and caustic chemicals I'd ordered for Dust work… probably wise. The amount of red phosphorous alone that had gone into my current stockpile of red Dust…

Shit did I miss them saying something?

"Mm." The one that hung around the Grav room the most shrugged. "Supermarket stuff. Not bad, not great."

"I will take that, if it's food on the same level as common store-bought, I've done my job pretty much right." I spun around, popping up the keyboard from its frame on the Server Farm and tak-taking away at it to pan my makeshift "DigiWorld Camera" around. Where had Yuramon gone?

Ah, buried right where they'd been earlier, snuggled deep into the earth, eyes barely peeking up over the rim of its little hole. I smiled to myself, and glanced to the half-dome device next to the rack. The Manifester.

It was a two-way road. I could… but then nobody would be able to get me out. I had to man the console here in order to set up the transfer procedures, and Yuramon wasn't yet able to do that for me.

Hm.

"Hm." I chewed on my lip. "I'm going to guess still no volunteers to actually visit the Farm in-person?"

Laughter from the guys behind me, followed by a chorus of "nope" and "hell no".

"Not unless you go in first." The guy that had been cooking up my produce chuckled.

"Can't, nobody else could get me out."

"Well then it looks like we're all staying out of the tinker's mystery box."

"You can look at the screen." I motioned to it. "The Farm's right there. This is what it looks like, though it'd be more Real in-person, the screen's only got so much resolution."

"Oh yeah, sure, just curl up on the little shelf there and get zapped by that thing. The lightshow when you pop one of these things out doesn't inspire confidence, bud."

I let it go with a shake of my head. Wasn't going to be able to do much with this thing today, then. Yuramon was too young to help. I plucked my digivice off my belt and plugged it into the Server. Best I could do now was just feed "nature" data into the thing and hope that made the digimon grow up a little faster.

That upload complete, I wheeled off again, and wrapped up assembling and loading the other two lasers, which were activated with grip-triggers and had safety switches on their cords. In theory a long squeeze would sustain the beam, but that was much more expensive than a pulse.

That was it for my Hard-Light dust for now too. Damn. I'd hoped to have enough to do some reloads without having to set up another batch…

Later.

No. Now. I forced myself not to put it off, as much as I wanted to get to the Hoverboots or the Map-o-matic, this had to be done.

Another hour of my life burned away as I futzed with chemical baths that were mixed by weight and included fun and volatile chemicals abound. Given I was the type of guy that was sensitive to even basic cut onions, the goggles that fit around my glasses and protected my nose were very much welcome.

Only after I had two batches set up in a freezer, one under a warming lamp, one connected to a wire set-up like I was trying to anodize the seed crystal, and one in a pressure cooker, did I wheel off to work on what I really wanted to do today.

Sweet, sweet hoverboots. I had a set of black-and-white steel-toes to work as the base, and those were stripped down to the sole, in fact the sole was gone entirely now, I was replacing it wholesale.

Slipping deep into the Flow, my hands reached out for the materials prepared around me. Parts from microwaves, a hobbyist jet engine, and more were disassembled down to their base components. I kicked off until I reached a yellow line of tape on the ground, then twisted and stood up, using a foot to push the chair back as I approached my lathe and grabbed round brass blanks, cutting out sets of rings that would help contain this hot mess.

I couldn't actually explain exactly what I did with all these pieces, at the end, but the next thing I knew someone was shaking me on the shoulder, and I had a half-done pair of boots on my desk.

What?

"Your time's up and your ride's here, Ed."

"Oh, right." I rubbed my head, damn, that had felt… a bit different than usual. Maybe something about how badly I wanted this… or maybe this whole thing had been easier than I'd thought? I'd expected these to take pretty much an entire week of dedicated work, not… half of one day.

I stood up and shuffled out to the car with my backpack, pulling on my hood. Then, to my driver's irritation, I had to make him stop so I could run back and do one last check on Yuramon. They were still happily chilling in the ground on the Farm, and trying to coax them back into my Digivice was a bust.

I left it and the device there for now, then, after setting up another upload of data about places like the amazon rainforest. Pictures, too, now, since it was going into the Digital World and not Yuramon directly. It would also be feeding the digital trees with "compost" that would eventually be recycled into data for the fruit.

Back at home, I made sure I hadn't managed to forget anything else (one of the mercs had picked up my lasers while I was working on the boots, so that had been delivered) and then decided to indulge myself with a hot bath instead of just a quick shower.

I felt better, today.

That… was good. I was amazed that I could, in a sense, drink my problems away.

Once a week. That's all I needed, and it was more about getting myself in a state of mind to actually talk to the bartender than just drowning my sorrows.

I could manage that.

Burden 1.X (Interlude; Lisa)

Moonlight streamed through the curtain of an window cracked to let the breeze in.

In her little office at the Undersiders hideout, Lisa stared at the purple-white-and-silver device that sat plugged into her PC rig as it began to vibrate and flash with light. She stared, and brought down the walls on her power. She wanted to know everything about this. Understanding Tinkertech was always harder than understanding events, machines, and people, but it could be done.

Device is consuming power. Device is converting data. Data is alive. Alive-data will act like living animal.

She cut it off. She already knew all that from the horse's mouth. Focus. How was it changing.

Data is gaining consciousness. Data was already conscious. Data is changing from Dreaming to Awake.

Okay, that was something. Would it be friendly?

Data is Loyal. Data is Partner.

She winced as the first throb of the headache started to build. She'd given herself a lot of those, these past few weeks. Every time she did anything with the "Digivice", she had her power working on it. Picking what she thought was the best information to feed to the egg. Even with that, she had no idea if she'd done things right. Even "Aether" had been no help in their private conversations. Apparently there wasn't a truly wrong way to handle one of these things other than outright starving it. That had been made impossible with the use of the camera and mic built into the damn thing. He'd suggested giving it "data" that was related to what she wanted it to help her with the most. So she'd basically been forwarding things from her work into it.

The process finished before she could really strain herself, the device announcing with a cheery chime that her egg had finished hatching. She looked at the little screen the size of both her thumbs put together, one hand propping her head up and pushing gently against her temple.

Her Egg had hatched into what the device classified as a "Relemon", and it looked like a little blob with a fox tail.

Fox features were expected. Fox-Data was intentional. Aether knew what form would hatch from Data-Egg regardless of input. Fox-Data was attempt at matching Partner to me.

Lisa hissed as the next throb hit, fumbling for painkillers with her free hand. The little device let out a chirp, a noise that seemed to come from the fox-blob inside. She threw up the walls before her power tried to give her answers she already knew, bringing the device close.

It was cute, if nothing else. Aether had informed her that it would require additional "Digital Evolutions", something about AIs growing through Iteration, in order to become a useful tool. As far as she was concerned, the device alone with its ability to scan for the entire EM spectrum was already a useful tool. Just playing with the device had given her the ability to seek out all the hidden cameras dotting her room. She could already do that, of course, but then she had to use her power. Coil's men changed the cameras out in fresh, interesting locations every time she looked them in the eye too often, part of the little game they played. Not having to waste her answers on finding them was already a small boon. Being able to repeat the feat at any jobsite? A greater tool. So many ways to use what the Digivice could detect.

Half of what she wanted the… "Relemon" to get as part of its diet was radio transmissions, encrypted ones. If Relemon could learn to crack those encryptions she'd be saving a ton of time and space on equipment. No need to get an "in" with police if she could just use this little thing to do the whole job, for example.

Then there was the truly secured lines. Her own power had verified what Aether had told her about that. Then it had helped verify all the things he'd said to her through that channel.

Thomas Calvert. Coil's civilian identity. She'd expected it to take several more months to finally crack that. Then she'd gotten it, and it became obvious why he knew so much about the other side of the coin. Why he'd always have intel about when and where the Heroes would be. Hadn't that been a wonderful thing to find out. It had been one thing when she knew he had moles. Moles could be worked around eventually, if she could ferret them out. Coil himself being part of the PRT? Not workable.

Almost idly, she started fiddling with the buttons of the Digivice, using the inbuilt systems to play with Relemon. There were a number of little games built into the thing, used to help train the digital creature, and just to pass the time. It was a good way to spend an hour or two while she let the headache abate. Only once she felt safe in using her power again did she set the digivice down and get back to work.

Sometimes the headache didn't go away at all, but she knew her limits. That had been close, but not quite on the edge of a real burnout. As long as she paced herself, she could keep digging. A little longer today, more tomorrow. Then rest up in time for their next job. Coil was building them up to larger heists, and she wasn't inclined to disagree on it. More money was exactly what she needed, and it would be a good chance to show Relemon what they would be doing. Even after Coil was dealt with, she anticipated she'd be sticking to the villain side of the grand game, because it was just more fun that way. Best to set this thing's expectations to that.

She'd have to maintain some sort of professional relationship with Aether as well, so he could do maintenance. He'd claimed that on its own the device shouldn't ever suffer that sort of issue, but even if it wasn't a shoddy bootstrapped junk-heap, the world of Capes was unpredictable. Any number of things could damage the Digivice and make it require repairs. She just had to hope that any damage that was incurred wasn't irreversible. If she lost this tool she'd be set back significantly.

So many things to consider with every move she made. Without her power it would be impossible, but with it… with it she knew that Aether would likely stick around once Coil was handled. His most likely path was one of independent villainy or becoming a mostly-neutral party like Faultline's group. He would maintain her gear, and possibly even sell her new equipment, without issue. So long as she didn't give him a reason to cut ties, she was set on that front.

She'd initially considered trying to get him into the Undersiders, but before she'd even asked, her power had said No, firmly. He'd reject the proposal both for his own massive pile of mental issues and also because, almost in spite of those neurotic tendencies, he intended to stay at arm's length from her. As much as possible.

Aether feared her, and she assumed it was because he had something to hide that she would eventually learn if they stuck too close. She wasn't sure what he would do if she figured it out.

She was tempted to try. Secrets like that were exactly the sort of thing she lived for; it was just too interesting to completely avoid.

Just as she was reaching for the Digivice to start investigating more deeply into its hidden menus and systems, someone knocked at her door. Brian, based on the weight and pattern of the knocking.

So much for getting anything interesting done today. Their mighty leader probably wanted to start planning the next job early…

A/N: Short, but i covered what I wanted to cover from Lisa's perspective.

Pressure 2.1

As I stared at my completed set of hoverboots, I recognized that I'd done something genuinely impossible. I'd worked on the other projects fast, but they'd been made under principles I understood, even if I required my power to make them happen. The Digivices and Digital World were operating on circuit boards. The Dust was an energized crystalline structure I could create. This? This set of hoverboots? It shouldn't exist. I'd expected to need to spend most of my time fabricating the exact materials to actually assemble a final product, but all those steps had been skipped. Something that should have taken the better part of two weeks had only taken somewhere to the tune of eighteen man-hours across two days. It was done. It was mine. I had a pair of true blue tinkertech shoes.

I could not be blamed for my mad cackle, the full-on supervillain laugh as I held my boots to the sky, one in each hand. The footwear didn't look too different from an ordinary boot until one noticed the air-intake vents around the ankles, or actually looked at the soles and noticed the pair of thrusters there instead of regular treads. Brown leather with laces hidden under a pull-away flap that itself was held on by a pair of zippers. They went up to mid-calf and had support for the whole foot while maintaining full flexibility, and a pair of shin-guards would easily fit over them. Yes, I absolutely could not be blamed for laughing like a madman at my success.

There was just one problem. I had no idea where it would be safe to test these. This building was a no-go both for size restrictions and because it was in the middle of the city. I'd probably have to get permission from Coil to actually test it anywhere. I had some freedom, but hoverboots were a big step up, and using them in city limits would basically mean announcing my existence to the world.

So I had a piece of equipment I'd daydreamed about pretty much since I'd been able to understand the concept, but I couldn't yet use it.

I put them on anyways, just because they were as protective as steel-toes and more comfortable to boot. Pun very much intended. The intake fans worked to keep things cool even when the rest of the system wasn't in use. That done, I went back to work, because now I had a lot more free time to work on the other project I'd sort-of promised to Coil. Something that, ideally, I'd want two copies of. If I could build one, I could build two, after all.

The short-range variant of the Map-O-Matic. One that would use D-Coder tech to scan the environment and build a map piece-by-piece. I'd have to make a piece of wonder-tech built out of 90s-style circuit-boards feed information into a literal alien piece of equipment and then get that whole thing displaying in a way that made sense to the likes of Coil.

No easy feat.

On top of this, I was still busy with my fully-manual setup around Dust production. I'd stopped bothering as much with the alloys since I didn't need to make huge stockpiles of those, but the glassware pans full of growing crystals needed to be checked, harvested, and reset pretty much daily. There was no getting around it.

Furthermore, there was still work to do on the Server Farm.

Then, if I had enough Hard-Light Dust, I'd need to get around to building more laser attachments for Coil so I could get money.

I needed…

I could…

I stopped where I was, hands lifting slightly from where I'd been about to bring them down on my keyboard. What if I used the extensive automation options available to me? What if I set up a "fridge" with multiple sealed environments and used a bunch of the robotics systems from Ratchet and Clank to automate production? Would that be so hard? Could I do that and still do this Map-O-Matic thing?

I frowned. No. No I absolutely could not. I'd be blowing my chance on something that complicated. But Dust-Tech was going to be a mainstay for Coil, just because of the laser attachments. As long as I split my attention between this and the Server Farm…

Instead of continuing to second-guess myself and waste time, I shot off an email to Coil and went about the drudge work of Dust while I waited for a reply. I'd leave it up to him what he valued more, the information potential of the Map-O-Matic or the increased and more stable production of the thing that fueled his mercenaries' anti-brute weapons. He got back to me within an hour, and confirmed my suspicions: the Dust took priority. If I could upgrade production of what I already had, it would benefit both of us.

I broke what I wanted down into sub-systems and considered my current solutions. A good chunk of this whole affair could actually be considered Mundane, honestly. The only part that needed Tinkertech right now would be the extraction of the Dust crystals. Putting it all together would also be a bit beyond modern, just for the size and weight being lower than they should be.

The first thing I needed was a rack of shelves that could be insulated from each other in terms of atmosphere, temperature, and other effects. That wasn't too hard, just a bunch of boxes air-gaped from each other.

Then each of those would need glass pans that wouldn't react to the Dust. Already had those, I might just have to reshape them a little. They'd also need a system that would harvest crystals of sufficient size. That meant tech that would note the size of the crystals and a way to extract them from the pans, then funnel them into a sorting container. I wanted to get a little fancier with it, too, and have it grind some crystals down into ready-made powder that could be dispensed. That was the most complicated pair of sub-systems overall, but easily doable with the tech Focus I currently had. The Solana, Bogon, and Polaris galaxies were no strangers to automated harvesting of reactive crystals. They knew their business and I was happy to use their strategies.

Each shelf, then would have an armature installed above it with a "hand" that would extract the crystals and deposit them. Then a series of non-reactive tubes would refill the pans with their various chemical concoctions and the process would repeat with seed quartz or ground Dust if that was what was required.

I tapped my foot, knee bouncing as I worked on the design and figured out all the finer details of making it work. This wasn't what I really wanted to be spending time on, but it was important work for the future. R might blow every other option I had for weaponry out of the water, but I wasn't going to get to the point of making those weapons any time soon. Mecha-shift was much more likely to become my daily driver weapon system.

Still, this project… compared to hover-boots it was boring, and I wasn't getting very deep into the Flow state. In fact it was almost like my power was resisting me. Or maybe I was just resisting myself.

I had fucking hoverboots. Why was I doing literally anything other than taking them for a test-drive?

I didn't send Coil a message, I just asked my minders.

"Hey. You guys mind setting me up outside the city on some backroad for a few hours?" I spun around in my chair towards the table they tended to relax around. Not all of them at once, of course, there were usually only three of the five guards sitting around at any given time. They were professional, but the job wasn't asking them of much right now.

"What for?" One of them asked. I was pretty sure that one was the leader.

"I have hoverboots that can clear at least highway speeds."

"That's a good reason." He nodded. "Alright, sit tight and we'll get the car around. Bossman will probably want it on camera too."

"I don't mind that." I replied swiftly. The only reason I hadn't just emailed Coil was because it would be too slow. I should have mentioned it along with the question about project priorities, but it just hadn't felt right.

Fortunately, things seemed to be working out. I'd get a chance to try this tech out on an open road, just as soon as I put on my customary black hood and got in the nondescript gray van. It was hard to contain my eagerness. My leg bounced, I could not sit still for the life of me, and I had to chew on my tongue to keep myself from saying anything stupid or just giggling like a lunatic.

One of the random thoughts in my mind was a brief consideration of if I was bipolar in some way, or if this was just how I was when I wasn't performing the mental equivalent of "I warned you about stairs bro". I dismissed it, because there were more important things happening. Like hoverboots, and the van finally stopping so I could take the hood off and examine the backroads of… Maine, apparently. Common consensus was that Brockton was just barely north of Boston, still in the same state, but apparently not.

Good, because there was a lot more empty space in Maine than there was in Massachusets. I had an out-of-the-way farm to myself, apparently. I elected not to question it or the miles of empty road up here. I assumed Coil had some spare land for himself, maybe this was some sort of safe-house for him, far enough out of the city that he could wait for heat to die down. I considered the puzzle of it, and realized that he couldn't use it under normal circumstances because of his civilian identity. Unless that got burned, he couldn't leave the city without a good excuse.

Or maybe I was overthinking it, and this was a place that nobody owned at all. Either way, it would suit my purposes. There was miles of dirt road and nobody to hear thrusters roar.

I rolled my shoulders and went through some quick leg stretches, standing before the open road in the afternoon sun. The controls in the hoverboots were intuitive, based on weight and how it was held against pressure sensors lined throughout the shoes. The more you pushed against the thrust, the harder the thrust would push back, that sort of thing. To turn them on, I just had to flick my toes up against a pressure bar across the top of the interior. Not a motion that was easy to make on accident, I'd made sure of that.

The boots flickered to life, pushing me a few inches off the ground in a sudden rush.

My legs skid out from under me and forced me almost into the splits, making me let out a strangled squeal of pain not unlike the typical response to getting kicked in the balls. Then, because the boots were still on, my body started getting lightly pushed across the dirt, and it was hard to even try and rearrange my legs. I had to flick them off (further stretching, which hurt), slowly pick myself up, and flicker on my Aura to recover the strained muscles. Then I just kept my Aura up, like I should have from the start, because it enhanced everything about a person, at least a bit. That included reflexes, reaction time, and balance. Or, rather, it seemed to amplify what was already there. I was still working on gaining those skills, but it was better than nothing.

Now properly covered by a glowing field that would make me stronger and protect me when I inevitably faceplanted again, I rubbed the dirt off my arms and tried again.

I lasted about five seconds before a foot slipped out from under me and I fell on my ass.

This wasn't like ice skating at all!

It took until it was dark to actually learn how to stay stable on hoverboots. To just "walk" with them, without going skidding off onto my ass or some other painful expression of failure. Aura protected me from the rare times the thrusters got anywhere near harm's way, but it was still a "fun" mess of embarrassment, frustration, and burning muscles. My legs were incredibly sore.

But I'd done it, I could stay stable while using hoverboots. I wasn't exactly moving very fast with them yet, more just drifting at walking speed, but the boots themselves weren't to blame. I would just have to master them until I could actually go fast. In a sense this had been a waste of time, coming out here, because I could have done this step in my workshop, but I felt that the dirt and grass was probably more forgiving than the concrete. Better to get regular practice out here in the open before trying to operate in enclosed spaces. Even in the game these boots came from you didn't typically use them indoors.

Still, I was at the point where I could drift around. That was a start. I'd be coming out here every day from now on, as part of the workout routine. I couldn't, unfortunately, cut into my "work" hours for it. That meant that, instead, I'd be shifting those hours forwards so I was effectively getting home at almost 9 at night for a bit.

More isolation. More training and building. I wasn't entirely sure this was worth it, even if it scratched some primal itch inside me to glide along to the sound of "quietly roaring" thrusters (I wasn't sure how else to describe the noise they made, it was a jet engine with the volume turned down!). I'd committed, though, and Coil had locked in my plans by nature of being the guy that paid the mercs that drove me around.

On the plus side, hoverboots. I really could not stress enough, even to myself, how incredible having these things was. I got to fuck with them every morning, now, as part of my workout routine.

That left the rest of the day to work on building a large Dust Production system, something that actually scaled up to take up all the space between one of the support pillars and the exterior wall, creating something like a wall in its own right. Parts had to be welded together, machines installed which mandated wiring, piping for all the chemicals… chutes and collection and all sorts of other little components to handle the completed Dust crystals. I had to plan out ratios so that I'd end up with roughly the same amount of every type of Dust, which, given how complex Hard-Light was, meant a lot of planning even halfway through installation. I had to check and double check and second-guess every time I set up a rack to produce a type of crystal.

It took the entire rest of the two weeks. When I wasn't explicitly working on it, I was either fiddling with the Server Farm (Yuramon still hadn't digivolved despite the data I was giving it), practicing with my hoverboots and going through a workout, or doing basic life stuff in my apartment.

My Hurdy Gurdy arrived, during this time, but I didn't even really get a chance to do anything with it. I still had to install soundproofing. I still had to set up other equipment. I had to cook, buy groceries from the few stores that were open late at night, and keep myself from falling behind on things like hygiene (in the apartment and my own body) all while trying to get an adequate amount of sleep. With what was now, effectively, fifteen hours out of the house every day? That was a lot.

It was the busiest I'd ever been in my entire life, actually, and I think that helped. I had a huge project, I had what amounted to an extreme sport to practice, and I had the daily grind as a whole.

I was left too busy and focused on one thing or another to really get trapped in my own head. Maybe during my workouts, but that was planning for the dust system. Maybe during my brief time before bed, but then I was too sore to think.

I didn't drink at the Palanquin, during those… ten or eleven days. I just kept working and crashed out. I was running on caffeine instead, joining the mercenaries in consuming pots of the stuff throughout my days, just to keep my energy levels normalized.

Some people lived like this without superpowers to keep them interested and focused. Some people did this with two completely different, physically demanding jobs. My respect for those people had already been pretty high, but actually living even a part of it? I only had, really, twelve hours of work and an hour of travel, with two hours on what most people would call a hobby. The real ones worked actual sixteen hour days, to their detriment.

It was a weird thought to have, a weird thing to consider when I was so busy. But I considered it, during one brief period towards the end, when I was realizing I'd have to go into something approximating "overtime" for myself to get this job done before my Focus swapped up. If I went home at the usual time, this project's last bin and the final steps wouldn't get done on time.

Mostly because of the scale. Mostly because I'd wanted to be careful and certain that I wasn't going to screw anything up. Possibly because my power seemed to resist this project, or maybe it had just liked the Hoverboots a lot more.

Whatever the ultimate combination of reasons, it had been my slowest piece of work yet. I poured an unreasonable amount of crystalline carbs into my thermos, joined by glugs of black bean water and a splash of fattened cow juice. The guards had switched to the other half of their squad. I'd be pulling an all-nighter on top of everything else.

A sip, the sweet nectar pooling over my tongue, warm and potent.

Back to work.

Small pipes fitted into slots made for them, wiring ran through, tested, hooked into components that needed power. Servos tested as they were installed and then again when the armatures they were built onto were fully assembled. Over and over and over, piece by piece. An hour passed in utter focus.

I got thirsty, I got out, one of the mercs handed me my thermos.

I drank it without thinking. Nothing happened, but for a brief instant I was struck by the vision of the coffee being drugged to knock me out so they could black-bag me for Coil. I wasn't sure if that was just my paranoia talking, or if I'd somehow gotten a glimpse of Coil's power at work. Either way, it threw me off, and made the following work a little slower.

I still got it all done just before midnight, final tests included. The whole system finally whirring to life as stocks of chemicals were poured in and video feeds started to light up. I'd loaded up parts of the system with cameras to monitor everything so that I could tell, at a glance, that nothing was going horribly wrong. At first blush? All was well. I'd probably have to do maintenance on this thing frequently, replace piping and wiring or maybe glassware, but it was working, it was stable, and the crystals that were sprinkled into the pans were already starting to take on new colors.

I smiled, and felt the power inside my skull click over to another Focus. Another civilization's tech-base. The old was gone. Ratchet and Clank's wild nanotech was out of reach.

In it's place was another space-faring civilization entirely. One that had to deal with a cult, space zombies, and a variant of fucking Human Instrumentality.

But it came with the working man's power armor, and the working man's weapon of choice.

It also came with the blueprints to build a "power generator" that I would rather blow my own brains out than actually construct, for one simple reason.

"Fuck you." I whispered to myself, snorting. "And fuck your Marker."

A/N: I swear this story is actually going to go somewhere during this arc. The foundation has been laid and now thanks to random chance, Aether's got the plans for a RIG and a Plasma Cutter.

His next meeting with Coil is not going to go as smoothly as the last ones.

Pressure 2.2

"Tell me, Edward." The voice from the laptop hissed, in a tone I'd yet to hear from the man that fancied himself a snake. "Tell me, have you been holding back in our arrangement?"

I racked my thoughts into order. This was not how I'd expected the standard meeting to go. A break in pattern after the third time? Sudden aggression? Had something happened in one of Coil's alternate timelines? I was tired, had to deal with the pressing knowledge that I could create a zombie moon out of a rock that "generates" EM waves in a manner that suggests they're acting as relays for a higher power, exhausted, strung out by the knowledge that my power wasn't one that would really let me take breaks, running on less sleep than usual, and did I mention tired? My mind was clearly not up to the task of wondering what the fuck brought this on.

Naturally, my mouth ran faster than everything else.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." I said blithely, sipping on my thermos.

"Previously." He explained, as though talking to a child. "I was willing to accept that you were only going to be able to produce perhaps three small projects or one small and one larger project in a two-week timespan. I understood that in exchange for the seeming infinite breadth of your power, depth was not something that would come easily. Then, however, you created your boots."

Picture-in-picture, an image of me working on my hoverboots popped up in the corner of the laptop's screen.

"Care to explain how you went from being slow and methodical by tinker standards to… this? Less than twenty man-hours to complete a project that defies all else you've created? I will know well if you lie to me."

Of course you will, because in another timeline I'm probably being drugged and being shoved into a woodchipper feet-first until I talk.

Unfortunately, neither version of me is going to be producing anything close to a satisfying answer. One of me is presumably screaming and blubbering incoherently because I struggle with the spoken word in the best of times. The other… has no idea what the fuck happened there. As I open my big stupid mouth, I can only hope that I don't somehow look insulted or angry or anything else Coil wouldn't want to see on my face regarding this accusation, because otherwise I might be going into Coil's happy funtime child-diddling box. Teen-diddling. Diddling snake box. I'm pretty sure I'm an adult. Maybe.

"I actually have no idea how that happened. It just did." I shrugged helplessly. "If I could have made the Dust Collector project go by faster, I would have. Same with the Server Farm."

"The Server Farm that is still not running according to your specifications."

"It's not quite autonomous yet, no, that was… a snag. I was expecting to be able to put people in to live there, but I'm the only one that could pull them out and nobody else is willing to test the DigiManifester portion of the system."

"So you lied to me from the outset of our arrangement?"

"I misjudged the scale of what I was asking myself to do." I hedged. I don't think he really bought it. He was expecting… more competence from me. Maybe. Or maybe he was just enjoying watching me squirm. Shit, this might not even be the real Coil, but his body double.

"That fails to track with what you have recently shown yourself capable of, Mister Edward."

"I've been working with my power for less than three months." I hedged, again, and added some lies about how long I'd been here to boot. "I didn't even get to really use it at all until I got your lab." Actually true and hopefully enough to throw him off assuming he wasn't some master of cold reading. Thank god I didn't go near the Protectorate with my failure of a poker face.

Seeing him sit in silence, I went on. "I honestly don't know what the exact limits of my power are."

"Well then." He smiled, something I could just feel even through a middling-quality webcam and that skintight suit. "We will just have to Test it."

Ice shot through my veins, and I went from being tense enough to bounce a leg to tense enough that my leg couldn't bounce. I chewed on my tongue to keep my mouth from doing anything stupid while I thought that sentence over and glanced at the mercenaries that were around me. Four on one, I had a Digivice with no Digimon, and Hoverboots I didn't really know how to use beyond straightaway boosting. Aura, too. I was technically a superhuman in terms of reflexes, strength, and endurance, but I hadn't exactly shot myself until I had lead injection immunity or anything. I had no idea if I could handle one of my own Hardlight Lasers being shot at me, and they'd certainly use that on my knees instead of wasting time testing bullets.

But none of the mercs were making to black bag me. They just stood there idly, relaxed, like this was normal. Only one of them actually had one of the lasers, and in theory I could boost across the room to get him first? Maybe?

No, don't be overconfident, idiot. You would get peppered with bullets in the back before you cleared the table.

Coil's laugh brought me out of my trainwreck of thoughts.

"Relax, my little Tinker, I have no intention of chaining you in a basement lab."

The Yet went unspoken. The strange hiss he had no doubt practiced to add smoothness to his voice didn't help when he called me "his little Tinker". I thought I was going to fucking puke for a moment, but I didn't have anything except coffee in my gut yet, so it was just acid in the back of my throat.

"Then what exactly do you mean?" I managed to choke out after swallowing the bile.

"I mean that you will tell me your latest specialty as normal, and then we will take an overview of projects, and we shall soon see which ones cast away the laziness you seem to be stricken with."

I swallowed again, chewing on my tongue.

"Yessir."

Spaceships, even smaller-scale ones, were out the window. Not until… not until Z was dealt with. That being said, Coil was tasking me with six different fucking projects based on what COULD be done, and one of them… well he didn't outright say why he needed such a massive upgrade to his Safehouses, but a spaceship-grade bunker could only be because of the Travelers. He was planning far ahead if he was already thinking about them and having plans drafted for a space that could hold Echidna, but that was just how Coil rolled. He saw something shiny he could manipulate and made contingencies with his bullshit power.

I was, personally, going along with it because I was invested in my own survival and having a bunker that was a massive step up from anything Coil could make without me would be a very nice thing to have if (god please be If) Leviathan came knocking.

So that was project one of six. Purely design work, using the fact that my current Focus was "closer to norm" and not quite as… black-boxed compared to other bits of Tinkertech. If I could provide the designs and properly idiot-proof them, they could be implemented by normals using normal equipment.

Then there was the "upgrade station", not the Bench, the "other" one. The one that would actually install and fit RIGs to bodies. It was technically a Store, but obviously this version wouldn't be… quite as capitalistic. Schematics for the Armament Kiosk (a much better name) to use would fill out the rest of the projects. The "all-in-one" nature of the Armament Kiosk was just too useful.

It was also a project that included its own fusion reactor purely so it could produce Plasma Cells to recharge Plasma Cutters and keep itself powered.

Sure, why not. Build a fusion reactor and advanced autonomous fabricator in two weeks on top of everything else. Make it more complicated by future-proofing it too, why not!

In theory, I could feed it material and schematics from RWBY, but I'd need to pick that Focus up again in order to actually do anything fancy. Right now it was just going to be built to handle Dust and Dust-alloy feedstock. The same would eventually be done for things from every other Focus I had.

To further pile on the work, Coil and I both wanted Stasis and Kinesis Modules.

Because sure, just fuck physics with a rusty fork that vibrates "quantumly", why not. Gravity field generation. Why not!

My head hurt, even with the coffee and water that flowed through my body.

This was going to be too much. I knew it was going to be too much, but if I didn't at least make progress on all of this shit… Coil. Just Coil. Nothing more need be said.

Of course, all of this would pretty conveniently keep me from making my own weapons, just schematics for weapons that his soldiers could get printed assuming I actually did my job right and produced the Armament Kiosk.

As I was dropped off inside my Workshop once more, the hood removed, I made a beeline for my computer, pulled out the painkillers, and reworked my schedule. No more hoverboot time. That was all going straight into the workshop if I wanted any hope of getting anywhere.

Tinkering was a trance, some said. I thought of it almost like the Flow State where you move without consciously thinking about it. Others had described it (at least in things I'd read before I'd been assassinated by cervines) as being possessed or blacking out and waking up with a finished product.

Whatever Tinkering normally was, this wasn't it. Before, it had been fairly easy to sink into things, I could do it even for the fairly menial tasks related to the Dust Collector. I'd gotten DEEP into things with the boots, working faster than I knew to be humanly possible.

All of that was currently gone. I was getting no trance, no real help from my power. Just ideas, blueprints. They weren't mundane. I knew they weren't mundane and my power bridged the understanding gap, but that didn't matter if I was currently all but locked down to being "normal" in terms of speed and, most importantly, Focus.

These were projects that I wanted to do, but trying to do six or seven of them at once?

My first day was spent in a familiar rush that came not from the calm of the Flow but the ice in my arms that said if I didn't throw myself into things I was going to die. Exaggerated, of course, even with Coil breathing down my neck he wouldn't kill me. I'd felt this about other moments in my life, too, and they'd been exaggerated as well. I was pretty sure, in the distant part of my mind that wasn't currently involved in moving my body, that this was a panic attack.

It got me moving, at least.

Unfortunately, it did things to my work quality that made the speed worthless. Better to do it right than do it twice, but I hadn't exactly been thinking properly.

So I woke up the next morning with a body that was sore, a mind that was stretching, and running purely on coffee.

It didn't get much better from there. Without the power propping me up, my focus naturally wavered. I tried to hold myself to doing different parts of a singular project, but it didn't last. Even cut off from near all distractions the internet of my home had provided, things like my hoverboots and the desire to use them clawed at the back of my mind. I spent two hours straight just poking around and doing, ultimately, nothing of importance with the Server Farm, just watching my little cotton-ball digital monster sleep in the sun in some sort of trance.

Then reality smacked me with its sledgehammer and the panic was back and off I went to create work that got undone and redone the next day.

I tried, then, to just do everything at once and bounce around.

Even that hadn't been sufficient. I had plans that had been transferred from my mind to the machines, but nothing that could build them. I had schematics with no actual physical item, and thus I knew that my Power would not let me build copies of anything. These blueprints, furthermore, would be next to useless for everyone except those living the cutting edge of modern science. Even with people that studied Tinkertech for a living… it would take years to put blueprints like these into fruition.

So I had nothing. Two weeks straight of bouncing around and I had a bunch of CAD designs and notes that amounted to fuck-all.

I also had about two hours left before the Focus shifted. Something I only realized after looking at the clock in the bottom corner of my screen.

Which was about the point I snapped.

Just… gave up.

Realized that I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

I spent the last two hours of my time with Dead Space, having accomplished nothing, sitting in a shower that had been set up at the workshop because I was now at the point where I hadn't left the damn place in a week.

The hot water didn't soothe the ache across my body, like my skin was too tight.

It didn't stop the fucking ice flushing through me, it didn't stop the way my guts gnawed on themselves. It didn't stop the sheer vertigo of realizing I'd failed beyond all belief and Coil had every reason to use this against me. Fuck, maybe it had been his plan from the start to overwhelm me like this and I'd just fucking gone with it because I was the moron who had - FUCK.

I clutched my head, trying to steady myself, trying to take those slow breaths that were supposed to help. I realized belatedly that my glasses had been brought into the shower and were now dripping wet, and I had to struggle to control my own body so I didn't violently hurl them across the floor like a toddler having a tantrum.

It probably wouldn't matter, the darker parts of my mind told me, because obviously my failure ass was doomed to being put in Coil's torture box until I was a tinker-slave that did whatever he wanted. I'd signed up for it, even!

I tried my hardest to shove that stupid shit away, but it was hard. So hard. There was nothing to numb it, nothing to get the voices to shut up because I hadn't even had the time to DRINK.

Just too much time to think.

Not enough to act.

The clock hit midnight. The cylinder rotated.

Click.

Dead Space remained fixed within my mind.

My Focus, while having "rotated", had somehow landed on the same one it had already done, back to back.

I am not ashamed to admit the relief of having another two weeks to get anything done with the Focus made me cry. It didn't really feel cathartic, but it was better than nothing.

Two more weeks. Maybe Coil had figured something out about my power, something about being able to lock in a Focus the way Eidolon could hold on to a power. I certainly hadn't felt much different other than being awake and stressed during the transition period.

More likely, then, I'd just gotten lucky.

Now I had to do something with it.

It sure as hell wouldn't be whatever Coil wanted after this.

A/N: Shorter and taking longer to write now, but still plodding along. Hopefully this will be the lowest point Aether/Edward gets to. He's finally hit the depths of his depression and found the power to be angry at people that aren't himself. The consequences will never be the same.

In regards to getting Dead Space to stick around: I rolled for it, I have it assigned to the number 6 on a D10.

I rolled 6-6-6, I dearly wish I was joking.

Last edited: Apr 4, 2023

Pressure 2.3

I informed Coil through Email that my Focus had "held" for another two weeks. I gave him zero additional thought afterwards. If I thought too hard about him, I would snap back into panic and bowing and scraping and being the exact sort of Tinker I'd never wanted to be.

I joined Coil, idiotic as it may have been, to attain freedom and nip problems that would potentially kill me in the bud.

I now needed to actually act upon that. Coil was a problem that now needed nipping, such that I could properly handle the issue of Echidna. Solving the Traveler issue would be the key to stopping Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse from visiting Brockton. Brockton, in some strange way, was the safest place to be for me, so I couldn't just leave. Anywhere else in the country would have Cauldron sniffing up my ass about as hard as a white woman's dog. No offense, Bitch.

So fuck Coil. After the shitshow of my fourth Focus cycle he'd just outlived his usefulness and Tattletale absolutely knew where he lived in his civilian guise by now.

It was 2AM, so I just left a message on my Digivice.

Aether: Use existing funds to subvert the two squads dedicated to me, then prepare to make a move on Coil. He dies in the next month. Advice on how to get these guys on my side without tipping him off is welcome, if it's relevant that I do anything. Otherwise just handle it yourself knowing I'm backing offers of tinkertech.

There. That was covered, I was too wired to get any sleep tonight, Coil wouldn't suspect anything other than "my power did a weird thing", so I got rolling. It wasn't often I found myself in the right mindset to really, truly tell the nagging doubts and distracting tangents in my head to go fuck themselves, but the teeth-creaking anger as I realized Coil had put me in this position?

That was apparently one of them. The cold in my veins was driving me to act, but I was actually behind the wheel for once instead of floundering in panic.

In some ways, Coil got exactly what he wanted. Time blurred, my power seemed to gel with me in a way it hadn't earlier, and we got it done. My passenger, for whatever reason (if I even had a normal passenger), was working with me on this. All of those projects I hadn't been able to do in two weeks?

Much like Issac himself, I was able to kitbash together a Plasma Cutter for myself out of scrap parts. Unlike him, I didn't use an existing plasma-based surgery tool to do it, just a TIG welder's internals and other various off-cuts. By the time the sun had come up (late, since it was getting into winter), I had the working man's "fuck you" tool on my belt. Not the classiest version and pretty basic as these things went, but I had it.

Now I just needed ammo for it. Given the projects that Coil wanted me to work on, the materials I needed were already there. That would come after a nap. I wasn't about to work directly with plasma-producing bullshit without a clearer head. I cradled the weapon beneath my pillow on a simple cot that was near my workdesk, close enough to the Server Farm that I could jump up and hook my Digivice in if I needed to.

I crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow, but it was a small mercy. My dreams… it was odd to actually remember their contents, a rare event. They weren't exactly very happy ones, and with them came concerns that the Focus of Dead Space was going to push me to make a Marker. Feelings of being isolated, Alone, incomplete. Being at some sort of edge and tipping right over it. The hands of thousands shoving me over.

Falling.

I jolted awake with a start that had me falling right out of the cot, but at least it was less painful than hitting the ground off a skyscraper. Fortunately, I didn't wake up somewhere unfamiliar on top of dealing with that. I also didn't wake up in Coil's little interrogation chamber, but right where I'd gone to sleep in the first place. There was a crick in my neck, my arm was dead asleep, and it was sunset, but I'd gotten some sleep. Rubbing my face, I glanced at the mercenaries around me who had glanced right back at me in turn, and nodded to them as I adjusted my sleep-worn clothes and stumbled towards the shower. Sleep, exercise, diet, pretty much everything had gone out the window in the last two weeks. The only thing I'd really done to take care of myself was keep myself clean.

Pathetic.

I'd do better. I would be better. I wouldn't let Coil and his fucking head-games do this to me any longer. I wouldn't do it to myself, either.

The warm water still didn't seem to help anything in my head, but spending ten minutes scrubbing myself down and getting the dust out of my hair was worth it in the long run. I learned that lesson long ago.

Stepping out of the "stall", I threw on clean clothes and my hoverboots, clipped my Digivice to my belt, and got back to work. My sleep schedule was officially nocturnal for a while, but that was fine. These mercs didn't seem to mind, certainly. Having an "easy" post probably helped. They got to quietly talk and joke around and play cards (with one or two of their number taking up more serious positions in the building at all times) while I worked.

Well, when they weren't enjoying the madness of the Zero-G chamber.

I worked with a fury for the next several days, keeping up the appearances of being stressed and still working on what Coil had asked for. It wasn't exactly a stretch, I was stressed, and I was working on projects that he'd wanted, but they weren't going to be for him and his anymore. The Armament Kiosk was going to be doing things just for me.

Creating a fusion reactor on the scale of a decent-sized microwave really should have been the work of a decade and a team of scientists, not something I could put together in less than a week on my own. I was once again struck at how much my power felt like a cheat sometimes. I still wasn't sure exactly what factors made it work… better, like this. Was it because these tools were going to be just for me? Was it because I wasn't in the same mindset as before? Was it because these tools were going to be put to use cutting the head off that fucking snake and thus engaging the "conflict drive", did my power even work like that?

It wasn't that I didn't have guesses, I just had too many guesses and no easy way to narrow things down. I just had to accept that my power was working better right now and run with it while I could.

Tattletale got back to me a few times while I worked on the Kiosk, informing me that she was in the process of buying out that small section of Coil's mercs that worked with me or otherwise knew I was the new Tinker working with the snake. Buying out two dozen mercs at a better rate than Coil's was something that should have required resources Tattletale didn't have. Unfortunately for Coil, I'd given her permission to make promises using me. Promises that most of the mercs that knew about me would know I could fill. So I guess the Kiosk wasn't quite JUST for me.

The promise of an elite squad backed with a suite of Tinkertech was a big one for these folks. The pay… was secondary to being able to play with toys on the caliber they were seeing me build.

That came to a head when I finally got the Kiosk done, and one of the mercs leaned around my shoulder to gaze at the industrial equipment.

"Damn." He grinned. "That does seem like a fine piece of work. This gonna be enough to make us a match for the lasers you shat out?"

"I'm… hm." I rubbed my chin. "Those lasers are strong enough that combining their fire in the right arrangement can tear an armored VTOL out of the sky. A VTOL made using the same tech, as in it can punch through the sorts of metals that make up its housing. Individually…"

He snorted. "You ever do any kind of testing at all, kid?"

"No time." I grumbled, stepping up to the Kiosk and flicking through what it had, checking its material hoppers and the like. I put in an order for several plasma magazines, and they came tumbling out of an actual vend slot beneath the screen, printed one by one.

I slotted one into my Plasma Cutter, and grinned at the mercenary behind me. He gave the weapon a once-over and shook his head.

"No sights, doesn't even really look like a pistol so much as a hardware tool from the space age. What's its range profile?"

"It pretty much is a hardware tool." I admitted. "One that happens to chop limbs off at…" I tilted my head, thinking back to both the games and the specs of the tool itself. "Twenty meters? And it doesn't instantly punch holes in ship walls or bust pipes open. Good clean fun for crawling around a bunker and chopping soft targets into chunks."

I found a holster design for the thing among my schematics, had the Kiosk print one out, and slapped it on my belt on the opposite side of the Digivice.

"You have any idea how to shoot?"

"I think I got to use a pistol at a range… once or twice."

"No clue then." He chuckled.

"I'm not exactly expecting to need accuracy at range or quick-draw reflexes. Not right away. Besides, pulling guns on Capes, even tinkertech, tends to not go over well."

He gave me a serious look. "Doesn't mean you can slide by on tech forever. Think the hoverboots proved that."

I winced. At least I was at the point of not falling on my face now.

"Better that my gear needs training to use anyways, right? Gives you all something to do."

"My squad could probably use some time on drills." The man rolled his shoulders, glancing to his team with glittering eyes full of mischief. Soldier of fortune that was willing to flip sides for some cool toys and extra money in his retirement fund aside, the merc was clearly still a person. As such, he took sadistic glee in seeing the groans from his two companions.

"Out of curiosity." I said lightly. "Do those drills include counterintelligence practices?"

"Mhmm, got those all out of the way while you were working."

I breathed out a sigh of relief. "How long until Coil figures out something's wrong?"

"About next decade. Your friend in purple did most of the heavy lifting. Building's clear and the old boss is none the wiser."

"Oh good." I leaned against the Kiosk. "Now I can actually learn your names without feeling guilty. Fair warning, they'll take a while to stick."

That was how things started to truly turn around, and I could begin openly plotting against Coil.

Last edited: Apr 5, 2023