After I closed the file once more, I checked my email. A message had come in from Empire Recycling, the company I had applied to earlier. They had accepted my application; orientation began May 15th. That gave me just about two and a half months to prepare before I went to Brockton Bay. Once there, I planned to contact the PRT and see if I could work something out. Of course, I'd have to establish myself a bit first. A cape with even some experience would be a hell of a lot more attractive than where I was at the moment.

Starting a career as a cape is tricky, especially when you're a tinker. I had to plan with care, because unlike most other kinds of capes, I had no way to pull a trick out of my ass. Everything depended on anticipating possible situations before they arose and preparing countermeasures to any imaginable threat. Therefore, designing the costume took a lot of time and effort. I needed something that would be warm in winter and cold in summer, that would serve as a sort of command hub for whatever other devices I ended up making. And, of course, it needed to be the most indestructible armor I could come up with.

All those things would have been doable, had it not been for one unfortunate factor. My parents, while accustomed to my habits of tinkering with small devices and spending hours on the computer, nonetheless would have gotten a little suspicious if I showed up with an entire homemade air conditioner or something. As a result, the suit remained a tantalizing design on my computer, except for a few minor components I was able to assemble here and there just out of curiosity.

Instead, I worked on my car. This was much easier to explain than some new project; it was an old machine, and had always needed a bit of maintenance here and there. It made a good test bed, too— plenty of horsepower to play with, a durable, self-contained electrical grid, and so on. The first and most obvious thing I did was fix the engine. I reinforced the crankshaft, thickened the piston walls, a host of other minor adjustments. I moved on to a few devices of my own, too— a small remote control function that let me summon the car if I was ever in a tight spot. Not the most earth-shattering device, but I had a feeling it would come in handy. I strengthened the chassis, the door locks, and fixed that weird bit of the ignition that never quite worked right.

Fixing the car also gave me some inkling as to exactly what my tinker abilities specialized in— armor. As I worked, my head would swam with images of new types of plating, alloys, heat-treated and high-carbon steels. If you had asked me, I'd have said with contempt that Kevlar was about as durable as tissue paper, and half as structurally sound. With the right metals, I could have crafted machines to outlast the Pyramids of Giza. Reinforced chassis, heavy-gauge springs, and a layered plating of my own design made it about as durable as a World War 2 tank— even the windshield. Layers of ultra-fine carbon, gridded and woven behind the automotive glass made it bulletproof, while transparent Aluminum oxide gave it rigidity. If I ever hit a tree in this thing, it was the tree that would have to worry.

It wasn't all rainbows and gumdrops, of course. The bane of my existence during this time was made of two things: economics and speech therapy. Getting the materials to make anything was a tedious, frustrating, and often expensive business. While any tinker could make the parts they needed over time, a good shortcut was usually to buy at least some components already built, then modify them as circumstances demanded. I knew tinkers sometimes were outed by hardware stores they frequented, or even by something as dumb as forgetting to file off the serial number from parts they hadn't made themselves. So I had to split my purchases up among a solid dozen hardware stores, and in a tiny-ass town like mine that was a difficult business.

Thus a lot of my parts had to be from…supplementary sources. Illegal dumping, out in the countryside, is a frequent eyesore. But it was also one I could use. Plenty of old appliances to be found in such sites, from toasters to lawnmowers. It wasn't the best quality stuff by anyone's definition, and quite often I had to push my powers to the limit, finding a substitute part for a substitute part for a substitute part in the machine I was building. My formal training as a structural engineer came in handy, working in concert with my newfound power— tinkers don't always understand what they're doing. It always irked me when I had to trust blindly in my abilities, relying on crazy stuff like cosmic background radiation or earth's exact position in the galaxy to cajole a particular connection into joining.

Of course, there were a lot of other confusing, annoying things going on while I was fixing the car. The first was after my dad hung up the phone and called Mom and I into the living room.

"I've just been on the phone with our insurance agent." He explained. "Our policy only covers two months of therapy sessions— any more than that and we'll have to pay out of pocket."

"Can we afford that?" my mom asked.

Dad shook his head. Mom reached out and squeezed my hand.

It's not like it's— I signed, then reached for the ASL book on the coffee table. —Helping anyway. I finished after a minute.

"Oh, honey." My mom said, pulling me into a hug. "We'll fix this, I promise. No matter what."

It could be —I paused to check the book again— permanent. We still —checked the book— don't know —checked the damn book— what caused it.

"Let's not think like that for now." My dad said. "The second MRI Dr. Rockwell ordered still shows that your brain is working fine, so we know there's no permanent damage. Promise me you'll keep trying."

I promise. I signed.

Still, therapy stayed the same as ever— lots of attempts at speaking in anything except grunts. No dice. At our last session, Dr. Rockwell said, "Well, just keep doing those exercises. It's still possible that you'll have a breakthrough one day and all this will seem like no big deal."

Thanks. I signed, before I climbed back into my wonderfully modified car and roared off.

Not more than a week later, I was packing to head to my internship in Brockton Bay. After dropping off my stuff in the apartment, I pulled in to the parking lot at Empire Recycling. I grabbed my whiteboard (still easier than expecting someone to know ASL) and headed inside.

"May I help you?" the secretary asked. I nodded, and wrote on the whiteboard. "I'm David Fraser. I'm here to start my internship."

"Oh, that's excellent!" she exclaimed. "You're much earlier than we'd hoped. Let me call Mister Lesterton."

She punched a few button son her phone. "Mr. Lesterton? One of the interns has just arrived. Yes. No." She glanced up at me, then lowered her voice. "The…special one."

I flushed. She looked up again. "He's down…the…hall. Fourth" —she held up four fingers—"on the right. Do you need me to lead you there?"

There was nothing I could do. I was incapable of voicing any sharp, sarcastic remark that came to my head —and none did. I could flip her off, which would probably cost me my internship, and leave a pretty big blemish on my record for potential employers. It hurt. Of course this wasn't the first time I'd been talked down to— it wouldn't be the last, either. It was the sheer helplessness of the encounter that really frustrated me.

I clenched my fists and turned on my heel to walk down the corridor. Mr. Lesterton's office was marked with a plaque bearing his name, and I knocked.

"Enter!" a quiet voice called.

Mr. Lesterton proved to be a youngish, powerfully-built man. He looked like he was about thirty, but his temples had begun to gray, and his eyes had the beginning of what promised to be deep wrinkles. "Mr. Fraser, correct?" he asked, not looking up from his brand-new, high-spec computer.

I nodded.

He kept typing as he spoke. "I suppose I ought to say it's good to see you, but I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."

I began writing "what would that be?" on my whiteboard, but he continued talking.

"You probably figured this out from Mrs. Temmell already, but the company only accepted you as an intern for PR purposes. Your qualifications do meet our standards, but no-one…" he gestured apology. "No one wanted to work with you."

"What does that mean?" I wrote.

"It means you're on the books and all, but no one else volunteered to take you in. So at last I volunteered, but if I'm being honest I've got no work for you. I'm one of the negotiators with the scrapyards that supply us, but if you can't talk, I don't see how you'd manage to negotiate prices with me. So here's the deal. You can spend your hours in the office however you want— so long as you don't mess up any of my files. You'll have to smile for a few pictures at the end of the program, and I'll take you on a few negotiations so that it isn't a complete waste of your time. At the end of the day you get a decent recommendation and a vacation, and the company gets some decent PR for hiring the disabled kid. Sound good?"

"Works for me." I wrote, gritting my teeth.

"Good!" he tried an awkward smile, then returned to staring at his computer screen.

Well this is fucking ridiculous, I thought. It was also, as my dad would have said, business. I could make a big fuss, but that would probably just get me dismissed with a bad recommendation. And if we're being honest, this was a job plenty of people would kill for. It was a little morally objectionable, but why should I care, so long as we both got what we wanted? There were much worse things they could have done.

So I said nothing, just opened up my laptop and started doing some research. I started on Armsmaster's suit, since he was one of the best Tinkers in the area. I noted that the design specialized in offense rather than defense, though. It had a host of exploitable weaknesses, provided you could survive getting close enough. I had considered making a similar suit for my own, but as I looked further into it, I realized that any attempt I made would be a poor copy.

The issue with powered armor was that unlike Armsmaster, I wasn't in very good physical condition. The suit I had designed was (as far as heavy armor goes) light enough for me to move without mechanical assistance, but adding more weight would make that less and less possible. But Armsmaster had his own physical strength as a starting point, amplified by his powered armor. Since I was starting with less power, any suit of armor I made would have to be far more powerful than his if I wanted to match it. And if he was as good a Tinker as the articles claimed, odds were that his suit was already pushing the limits of how much you could augment human strength before just building a really big robot that mimicked your movements.

I'd have to find a better way to exert force than using powered armor. If I stayed on that path, I'd always be second-best, since even spending a ton of time at the gym wouldn't make my reflexes or coordination any better. So I would find a method more suitable to my particular skills. Something more like…Dragon's technique.